He’s broadcasting the wifi-signals onto my property.
False.
The presence of the wifi signal does not interfere with your homestead, thus can not be an aggression.
Ownership of the radio spectrum is a form of property completely separate from ownership of land.
Building a house does not grant you ownership of the radio spectrum surrounding your house. The only way to homestead a spectrum is to broadcast on it.
If somebody encrypts their Wifi, it implies that they do not want somebody using their wifi. Therefore, cracking the encryption and using it is a violation of their property.
Solution: better encryption
If I homestead a portion of the radio spectrum by transmitting a signal, that portion of the radio spectrum becomes my property. Don’t use it! You’ll interfere with my signal.
I think a more proper analogy would be:
He is spraying wate on his own lawn, yet you have a glass that crosses into his property and takes his water.
This is still stealing, just as you getting a very long stick into somebodies property to steal some apples from their apple trees, and those are my two cents.
-Luis
But it’s my radio and the airspace above my property is mine.
And who says you have homesteaded a portion of the spectrum? Where are your borders and how do you propose to enforce them?
Nonsense.
When I own a road I am telling people what they cannot do with their own property; they can’t drive their car on my road.
No its not.
You going to collect tolls from over head planes? You own your homestead and thats it.
Appeal to ignorance.
The borders are wherever signals interefere and you enforce it however neccessary.
False.
Music effects a person’s ears. A radio frequency only effects radio equipment.
False.
A radio signals does not take up space, so can not be a trespasser on anything other the radio spectrum. It can only conflict with other signals.
Which means that two signals can coexist without either trespassing.
Yes.
Two people can not exist in the same place at once. However, a person and a radio signal can exist in the same place once.
What I’m proposing to do is emit radio signals as I please. If a plane flying overhead doesn’t like it too bad.
Assume no government and no contract with whoever is claiming to own a portion of the spectrum. How will he enforce an alleged right to limit my use of my own radio? For that matter how will he prove he owns it?
The principle injustice of copyrights and patents is that they limit other people’s use of their own property. But doesn’t spectrum allocation do exactly the same thing? I think the only way to handle the problem is to have completely voluntary arrangements between radio owners. If one party doesn’t cooperate you can just buy a stronger radio than his, or do without.
Bad analogy. Assuming they have obtained your permission to use your road they have consented to be limited by your rules. How does simply buying or building a radio obligate me to you?
This problem seems analogous to the intellectual property problem.
You can keep your radio signal private as long as you keep it to yourself, i.e. keep it within the bounds of your property(or to the extent you work to keep it private, through the use of encryption), but if you spread it on to my property by brodcasting it, then you have no right to stop me from accessing it(much like you cannot stop me from obtaining your idea if you yell it at me from your property).
The hose/water analogy doesn’t accurately reflect the situation (and it’s a bad analogy anyway, but…) - if your wi-fi signal is water from a hose, your neighbour can certainly listen to the signal that reaches his property (i.e., can passively monitor your traffic…or drink your water), but that doesn’t say anything about his injecting new packets into your network, which he may not do.
I dont think it’s the same as the IP issue, because in this case I have protected (encrypted) data, and you’re breaking into it. Yes, the signal was broadcast into your house. But to change that, you’re asking that the laws of physics change. The radio signal does not interfere with anything of yours. And sure, you can monitor it as someone else above said, because it is in fact in your house. But you cannot put your own data through it back into my house. That is a choice you are making, to invade and use my internet utility. That’s aggression. Now if you’re saying that if I don’t encrypt my wifi, its fair game, then I agree. I think its agression though to hack my encryption and use my network.
Wifi broadcasted without encryption assume invitation.
Wifi encryption and password protection implies that you are not allowed to use the connection without permission.
Think of it as a public server. Website being accessible to the world implies that everybody have permission to visit. Bots that crawl sites looks for robots.txt to see if they permission to index information.
I think that is clear and reasonable property right rules.
Indeed.
But I did not assume permission was obtained.
Drivers do not have to consent to my ownership, they are limited by my rules regardless. For example, no one can drive on my road unless I allow it; that rule does not come into existence due to any agreement it is part of my right as owner.
Then you’ve created a tragedy of the commons. You can emit anything you want, so long as you don’t infringe on others; but as soon as you interfere with your neighbor’s ability to listen to the baseball game you are trespassing.
Still appealing to ignorance?
How will I enforce my right to keep your car off my property? By towing it.
How will I prove my ownership of my property? By demonstrating that I was there first.
False. I’ve already given you an example where ownership of physical property limits how other people can use their own property. Ownership of a car does not give you the right to use it however you want, ie you can’t use it in any way that violates the rights of others. That is why you can’t drive it on my road.
The injustice of patents is that violating a patent does not infringing on anyone’s rights. If I build my own cotton gin, no one else is deprived of their cotton gin. There is no maximum number of cotton gins. This does not hold true of radio signals, as there is scarcity in the radio spectrum. If someone begins broadcasting a signal conflicting with a previous signal both are destroyed, so we need property rights in order to utilize the radio spectrum.
Using your radio equipment is thus more similar to parking illegally then building a cotton gin.