U.K. Pub Fined For Copyright Infringement Over Free Wi-Fi

It's a grey area, but something that small shops and providers of free wi-fi might want to begin thinking about. What happens if someone comes into your business, and uses your free wi-fi to download copyrighted material? For a pub in the U.K., it's an expensive question, to the tune of $13,000 (£8k).

Hotspot provider The Cloud wouldn't give many details, but it said that it believes the case to be the first of its kind in the U.K. The fine had been issued in a civil case, brought by a rights holder, "sometime this summer." They would not identify the pub, because its owner had not yet given permission for the case to be publicized. However, The Cloud's larger pub clients include Fullers, Greene King, Marsdens, Scottish & Newcastle, Mitchell & Butlers and Punch Taverns.

Hopping onto a free wi-fi hotspot, or even a paid one, to access P2P networks certainly is not unheard of, just not well-publicized. It wouldn't be difficult to imaging it being quite popular among the downloading crowd.

However, law professor Lilian Edwards of Sheffield Law School said that, in theory, under existing "substantive copyright law," a business could be classified as a public communications service provider, which would make it exempt from being responsible for such illegal downloads. This agrees with legal advice sent to The Cloud by the law firm Faegre & Benson on August 17th of this year, where they said "Wi-Fi hotspots in public and enterprise environments providing access to the internet to members of the public, free or paid, are public communications services". As a public communications service, only the users of the hotspot would be liable for copyright infringement.

While it's unclear if this would apply in the U.S. as well, Earlier this month, an entire town's free wi-fi was shut down because of one, count 'em, one, illegal download.

Coshocton's wi-fi was provided free by the town, but it only covered one square block surrounding the Coshocton County Courthouse, not the entire town. Still, the MPAA moved to shut down the service after one illegal movie download, reported authorities.

While used for one illegal download, the service has, or had, official uses. For example, Coshocton County Sheriff’s deputies would park in the 300 block near the courthouse so they could complete a traffic or incident report without leaving their vehicle.