Originally Posted by vulpes
The story about the precedent that established freedom of the airwaves is kind of interesting.
A frugal farmer (don't want to get off thread) whose place was located under a high tension line decided to light his barn by erecting a fence around the barnyard. It was a wire fence made with one long piece of wire like a coil. He ran the ends into his barn and ran the lights from the electricity collected by induction from the high tension lines. The power company saw his new lights and sued him for stealing their electricity. But the court found in the farmer's favor because the electricity had already leaked out of the lines and was going to waste anyway.
I hope that this story isn't true. I'm an electrical engineer and I can assure you that it doesn't work like that. What the farmer did is analogous to stealing water by poking a hole in a water reservoir and claiming that the water was just going to waste by leaking into the reservoir. The electricity wasn't going to waste, it was just being stored in the air. Of course, you could argue it was the farmer's air and the power company had no right to store their electricity in it, but the electricity certainly wasn't going to waste.
This, by the way, is a completely separate issue from the freedom of information concerning electronic communications. The information communicated over wireless internet could just as well be transmitted by word of mouth, or newspaper, or smoke signals. After all, FCC stands for Federal Communications Commission. The fact that electricity is a particularly efficient tool for both communication and power delivery is merely a coincidence.