Update: Ohio town gets its free WiFi back!
November 18, 2009 by Valerie HelmbreckPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Information security, Latest News & Views, WiFi, file-sharing
A flood of bad publicity surrounding the shutdown of free WiFi service in the tiny Ohio town of Coshocton has apparently resulted in the service being reinstated — for now.
After a user of the service illegally downloaded a movie using the connection, the powers that be in Coshocton (population: about 12,000) got an earful from the folks at Sony Entertainment (population and assets: a lot more than the town and its coffers) and the Motion Picture Association of America (another corporate behemoth).
Officials of the town decided the free WiFi service could potentially cost them a lot more than the ISP’s fees, so they shut it off. That left folks within about 1000 feet of the county courthouse — the area the service was provided — without the free connection.
The bad news about the poor folks of Coshocton and their plight quickly spread. Here at FinanceTechNews, we pounced on the story as well. It was, we thought, a cautionary tale to anyone who provides free WiFi access.
The lesson: User behavior can come back to haunt you.
Sony, via its communications folks, quickly tried to reassure the world at large that they weren’t trying to beat up on a tiny, middle America town. They were merely alerting the town fathers to the presence of a serious criminal in their midst (our words, not theirs). They asked the town to restore the service and are pledging to help officials help “identify ways to prevent similar offenses from happening in the future.”
Does that mean they’ll be paying for the pricey software it takes to block such nefarious behavior? Nobody’s saying. But town officials are meeting this week to discuss the future of free WiFi in Coshocton.
And while the service may be restored, the shot fired over the town’s bow by both Sony and the MPAA has been heard by other free WiFi providers. Although bad publicity (Sony and MPAA were bombarded with irate calls and messages about their bullying behavior, Coshocton’s IT director told the local ABC affiliate) forced the corporation into contrition, their message was crystal clear: Let users share copyrighted material on your network and we’ll be on your doorstep.
Didn’t they learn anything from the way the music industry handled similar cases in the past decade? Wait, Sony is in the music industry. Now their behavior makes sense!
FinanceTechNews.com delivers the latest Finance news once a week to the inboxes of over 150,000 Finance professionals.
Click here to sign up and start your FREE subscription to FinanceTechNews!
Tags: access, Coshocton, free, Motion Picture Association of America, Ohio, Sony, WiFi
December 29th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Serious Criminal?
Get serious yourself. That is truly ridiculous. Who pays for your company? Sony? MPIA?
I was stabbed in the heart 30 years ago. That man was put in jail for a few years. That is serious.
What you are saying is so far from serious that I can’t pay any attention to anything else you say.
Serious crime? What about the law suit against the record industry by the many recording artists that are NOT getting paid for their work by the same people that are pouncing on people downloading music? Did you report on that and call the recording industry “Serious Criminals”? The recording industry has already acknowledged 50 MILLION dollars owed to these recording artists, and one figure I have heard says the amount owed may reach up to 6 BILLION dollars. I don’t know this first hand but google it and see.
From what I heard, Recording companies have been releasing “compilation albums” including 1 song from many different artists.. and then listing the royalties for the use and sale of this song as some kind of a “debt” owed to the artists. The trouble was they never got around to paying these “debts”.. .but they had plenty of money to spend to hire lawyers to sue individual users who downloaded a few songs. Talk about hypocrisy…
How can you be so blind as to the misdeeds of the recording industry (and I am sure equal problems with motion picture studios) and call a single person downloading a single movie as a “Serious Criminal”? Get Real. Be sure and call the jay walkers of the world “serious criminals” and make sure they are fined $250 for each time they have jay walked… and be sure to count them all up together so you can fine them $20,000 and ruin their lives.