Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
same question was answered by the ethics guy on npr yesterday. i missed the show
The dude said that he thought it was OK to leech, provided you weren't a bandwidth burden and you paid for a service. He had the idea that people that use the internet should all pay thier share to use and support it. As long as one pays their "usage license", so to speak, it is ethically OK to leech bandwidth, according to the NPR guest.
The example he gave was a guy that paid for DSL and had a desktop PC. He bought a laptop and found that there was an unsecured network available. He still subscribed to the DSL service, but used the lappy for surfing and light internet usage when it was convenient.