This is a business and satellite bandwidth is fairly precious.

A better analogy would be going into a restaurant with big “No Outside Food” signs with a sandwich you made at home, hiding the sandwich in a false compartment to get past a check at the door, printing the restaurant’s name on your sandwich wrapper so it looks like you bought it there, and then eating it at a table meant for paying customers.

I love these analogies, but that's wrong. A better analogy would be you use their raw ingredients to make your own food, bring your own utensils and plates, and sit at their restaurant to eat. Basically, you're leasing their bandwidth without payment. Airlines are paying viasat or some other company for access to their satellites and expecting customers to pay the cost for usage (and probably make some profit).

Uplink for airplanes is not free by any means.

Regardless of the criminality a real world analog would be more akin to someone taking a chair in a starbucks without paying - maybe there's room, and maybe it doesnt burden them unduly - but the company definitely pays a cost for each table aggregated across its customers.

> Probably because this is a victimless crime...

How is this a victimless crime?

It's not victimless, the loser is the service provider whose bandwidth is consumed. The line many draw is that corporations aren't people and can't be the victim, this is a false analogy.

Thus: let's switch who is penalized: everyone else on the flight. Bandwidth isn't unlimited, without payment it's hard to justify increasing bandwidth if it isn't profitable.

What should the author do? Report it. If he didn't, maybe you can submit it to the company. If they have a bug bounty, you may get paid (if this happens: would you give the money to the original author?)

If you run a company: you should determine how to insensitivise reporting, it's possible in this case: not fixing it spreads awareness, most people can't/don't exploit it.

> "Thus: let's switch who is penalized: everyone else on the flight."

Only if everybody else on the flight was paying for WiFi (doubtful) and bandwidth was maxed out during the flight (plausible.)

Correct, I failed to clarify it penalized the paying users IF bandwidth was maxed out.

Name the victim, please.

Because it looks like it causes a infinitesimal harm to a corporation whereby no person is harmed to any noticeable extent, aka a victimless crime.

"Victimless crime" doesn't mean there are no negative effects, it means no _person_ is a victim.

Every user who bears the additional cost of the service because of freeloaders is a victim.

Your working definition sounds like it's wrong: Could you give an example of what you call a "victimless crime"?

Have you tried Wikipedia?

What you're describing (someone entering your property, having their lunch in your garden and cleaning up before leaving) meets all the elements of physical trespass if the owner of the property didn't grant permission, and is unlawful. Now, the damages might be minimal, but it's still unlawful.

In the U.S., property law is about the right to control access and use -- harm is a secondary concern.

Well, mentally ill people sometimes do break into houses and do harmless things, like making a sandwich or taking a shower, and this generally has severe consequences for them even though it was not malicious, and is of course experienced as a shock and/or violation by the owner who discovers it.

It's really weird that this is presented as normal so frequently in a virtual context.

Granted that's still a crime. You probably won't use the video recording of that guy to file a police report (unless you suspect he did something else on your property, which would be like the author also running aggressive nmap scans) just as viasat is probably not going to file a lawsuit.

Closer to breaking into a vacant hotel room instead of checking in at the front desk.

maybe more like someone entering a restaurant, sitting down at one of their tables and eating a lunch they brought themselves, or just reading a book, taking up that table during a busy lunch period.

No, it's more like tricking the restaurant staff into giving him a free meal.