State Super-DMCA Too True

Sun Mar 30 07:42:42 UTC 2003

On Saturday, 2003-03-29 at 23:22 CST, Jack Bates <jbates at brightok.net> 
wrote:
> William Allen Simpson wrote:
> > (Some DSL/cable companies try to charge per machine, and record the
> > machine address of the devices connected.)
> 
> And to use NAT to circumvent this should be illegal. It is theft of
> service.

No, it is not theft of service.  It doesn't cost an ISP more for me to 
have 20 machines than it does if I have just 1.  Nor does it cost them if 
I use NAT.

What might cost them more is if I use more bandwidth or use additional IP 
addresses (for which there may be an associated expense).  But a user with 
one machine can potentially use as much or more bandwidth than a user with 
20.  There simply isn't a decent correlation between number of machines 
and amount of service consumed.  Even so, an ISP doesn't have a legitimate 
complaint against users that are simply consuming the bandwidth that the 
ISP advertised as being part of their service.

Tony Rall