Perhaps this guy is a regular. Does it really matter if he uses the wifi before or after he goes into the shop as long as he goes back? What’s the legal window of usage? Is it legal if he last paid for coffee 20 seconds ago, 20 hours ago, 20 days ago? 20 seconds from now?

I think it could well be argued that the point of free networks is to entice customers to become active patrons of their store. Keep in mind the retail view that shoppers are customers in a real sense, even if they have not bought anything.

Truth is providers of free products/services provide them as a way to ENTICE someone to make use of their paid products/services.

Forget wifi a moment and think of a simple free service most coffeeshops provide. Restrooms.

Do they mind if I use the restroom before or after I get my coffee? Heck I might even go in there twice if I’m there a while — once to wash my hands before I order and another time before I leave to “output” part of what I just drank as “input”.

And god forbid sometimes I have gone into a restraurant or coffee shop and USED THEIR RESTROOM WITHOUT BUYING ANYTHING.

Hide your shock. It’s OK.

When the restaurant manager scolded me on my way out and told me the restrooms were for paying customers, he got a little shock of his own.

I told him, “Um, I was GOING to be a paying customer until I saw your restroom had cr** all over it, smelled like a pit-toilet outhouse and the sink had no soap and no paper towels.

“There’s a little sign in there, ‘Employees must wash hands before returning to work.’ but that’s exactly what’s so disturbing. I want to vomit at the thought that the guy who would be making my sandwich had to wash his hands in THERE. And you really expect me to place an ORDER FOR FOOD before I leave? GET REAL.”

So there’s a good case of a free service which was using a convenience as an enticement, but it ended up being a deterrent toward my patronage. True, there is a direct correlation there between cleanliness of the restroom vs. sanitation in the product I would be buying.

But who’s to say that shouldn’t be the same for a coffeeshop? Perhaps the enticement there is on the verge of working. I want to go pay for a coffee while I do some work over the Internet for free. But before I go to the trouble of going into the shop, I see whether or not my network card is working before I go in. Or maybe I can’t remember what type of a wifi this is — is it a paid one or a free one. If it’s not truly free wifi but instead like a pay-required T-mobile hotspot, then perhaps I’ll choose not to go in and drive on down the street. I might even try and USE the free connection for a moment quickly to see if it’s worth me carrying my stuff into the shop or not.

It’s simple, and others have made the point well elsewhere above. If you’re going to run a “free” wifi network as a service to anyone, or if you’re going to run any type of unsecured wifi network, you need to be savvy enough to be aware of the technical issues involved in setting up such a point and taking steps to secure it against unwanted access.

If you want an analogy to use, consider homeowners who live along a creek. On the other side of the creek is a woods that the neighborhood kids play in. The kids all figure their own way across til one day one of the parents decides it would be safer to build a nice little bridge. Some of the other neighborhood kids start using the bridge. The bridge builder has no fence around his property and the bridge has no gate or other way to secure who uses the bridge. But the yard and the bridge still belong to the bridge builder. Anyone who goes across their can be charged with tresspassing.

UNLESS

The bridge-builder continues to allow the neighborhood kids to make use of his property (the yard and the bridge) for years and years. Then it’s possible, courts have ruled, if you don’t enforce your property rights, you are silently giving permission. Classic cases involve kids or dogs who always cut through yards to get from the street to a school behind the property or whatever. What happens is that unless you stand by your rights, you lose them.

This could also be the case with free wifi, were it not for one simple thing. The wifi networks use the purposely unregulated public airwaves.

To me it matters very little whether a business owner enticed someone to their property with a free service or with a paid product. The point is, they invite the general public to make use of their parking spaces and welcome the general public onto their property.

For business owners who insist on offering free and/or unsecured wifi access, it would make infinitely more sense to address the concern as a property rights issue rather than on technical merits. If a guy is sitting outside in his car for six hours while using the cafe’s wifi, then the cafe owner should ask him to move his car so that the parking space can be used for paid customers. Let the cafe owner post signs at the parking lot entrance saying there’s a two-hour parking limit; violator will be towed. If the cafe doesn’t have its own parking lot but is part of a strip mall, then they have to address things like that in cooperation with their landlord.

The legal issue of using wifi and not buying a coffee is not a technical issue. The legal issue of using the restroom and not buying a sandwich is not a plumbing issue.