Check it out in Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town .

Sure, it's only fiction. But my home wireless, which I invite you to use whenever you're within range, is called ParasiteNet.

I was delighted to see several people acknowledging their intentionally open wireless nodes. If you are bopping around Glencoe IL, and notice "ParasiteNet", you are totally welcome to connect through my DSL.

I'm puzzled. Acoustical delay lines were liquid state, but they haven't been used in many decades. What liquid, gaseous, or plasma-state storage have I missed? The poll question and the discussion seem to treat rotating magnetic media as not "solid state." Those disks sure seem solid to me.

This is where I buy music today: http://magnatune.com/ I bought their entire list, past present and future, in a lifetime subscription. I listen to everything, whether it's something I think I like or not. I like lots of it, and the rest expands my listening capacity.

Actually, my job in the message that I posted was to discuss rational evidence, rather than what particular authorities will do in particular circumstances. I am very aware that inadequate evidence often works in practice.

To the point: your "test" doesn't test what I was talking about at all, but something quite different, though unfortunately connected in practice.

You seem to have some strong, and questionable, assumptions about the responsibility of particular people for activities marked by particular IP addresses (or for particular Internet access points that they run---perhaps that's what you meant by "IP address"). This is a new sort of responsibility, and hasn't been mapped out carefully. I don't usually take responsibility for the behavior of people who walk down the sidewalk on my property, although I have responsibility to clear it of snow and ice. On the other hand, I would take greater responsibility for controlling access to a swimming pool in my yard. The right sort of responsibility for Internet access through a particular wire or wireless transceiver is not really obvious, and needs some careful thought. Many people, including myself, favor something closer to the sidewalk level of responsibility than the swimming pool level. Bruce Schneier is a much greater expert than I am, and I encourage you strongly to read his essay favoring unprotected wireless access (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wireles.html).

Apologies in advance: I can't resist a bit of silliness. In the famous monologue about Albert and the Lion (written by Marriott Edgar, most famous performance by Stan Holloway, who also portrayed Mr. Dolittle in My Fair Lady), a lion at the Blackpool zoo ate young Albert Ramsbottom. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsbottom went in front of the magistrate, "told 'im what happened to Albert, and proved it by showing his cap."

So we can go in front of a judge, claim that someone has violated a copyright, and prove it by showing his IP number?

From TFA:

That logic was never vaguely reasonable if the equation is taken to be a reliable identification for any legal purpose.

If someone comes into court with an IP number, one needs to know a whole lot about how that number was discovered in order to consider giving them any credibility in associating some misbehavior with a person who is supposedly associated with that number. Mere knowledge of my name, or my car's license plate number, or my US mail address, or even an envelope with my US mail address on it, doesn't associate me reliably with any particular behavior. I couldn't find any mention in TFA of the evidence that the IP numbers quoted in court were used by any particular person to violate any particular law. I haven't found such information in other articles on this topic, nor in some court documents that I read. There could be such evidence (with different required strengths for different sorts of legal actions), but it is not a simple thing and it needs a thorough explanation.

What sort of packet was collected with the allegedly offending IP number? Was that number the destination or the return address? Was the collection itself legitimate, or was it an illegal act of eavesdropping? What evidence (not neccessarily strong evidence, maybe just prima facie) indicates that the IP number was written into that packet due to some illegal action by a person associated through an ISP with that number? Until I see some serious explanations of these points, I can't develop much sympathy for the demand that an ISP identify a customer, much less for an accusation against that customer.

Before showing contempt for those who run open wireless nodes, please read what Bruce Schneier writes about the courtesy of sharing network access.

Perhaps you follow some set of rules that you picked up somewhere, but there is no compelling foundation in law or ethics for requiring restricted access on network nodes.

Mate, of course.