For three months Washington resident Alexander Eric Smith piggybacked on the free wireless connection provided by Vancouver coffee shop “Brewed Awakenings”. Everything was going swimmingly until recently, when Smith found himself arrested.

Although Smith did not enter the shop and was therefore not loitering (in fact he was in the store’s parking lot the whole time, sitting quietly in his car), coffee shop management said he had not bought so much as a single cup of joe. And that rubs them the wrong way. From an article in the EE Times:

“‘He doesn’t buy anything,’ Emily Pranger, the shop’s manager, told KATU, a Portland, Ore. television station. ‘It’s not right for him to come and use it.’”

We agree, but does she have a legal leg to stand on?

Apparently the police will attempt to prosecute Smith under a law that’s also used to punish those who steal cable, utilities or leave a restaurant without paying (we don’t know how cable theft relates to stolen grilled cheese either but we’ll take their word for it).

The story gets juicier with this tidbit in Slashdot which claims that Smith is also a registered sex offender.

Will this make a difference for the coffee shop’s case? Could Smith be intimidating customers by looking at obscene material on his laptop, even if it’s not in plain sight?

We’ll keep our eye on this one…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Legal Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.