said by k9iua6:I believe a resident would be responsible for any equipment they installed beyond what is provided or needed by their ISP. In other words, with a wireless access point you install, you would be considered responsible for seeing that it is secured and not being used by outsiders. I know that is the stance we place on the residential students at our educational institution. We permit them to install consumer wireless access points in their residences, but we also ask that they take at least minimal steps to secure them by changing administrator passwords and suggest they introduce some level of encryption and turn off broadcasting.
We actually had a case where we received an incidence of downloading copyrighted material, and when we traced it through our system, found it traced to an open wireless port. Fortunately it was another of our students who was inadvertently picking up that wireless access point instead of their own, and could take further steps, but it can happen.
But the short answer is that I believe the copyright holders would still see you responsible if someone used your network, with or without permission.
I can understand holding the user responsible if a user does something negligent like an open wireless access point, doesn't change their admin password, etc. However, I don't think it's reasonable to expect users to be responsible for the absolute security of their systems. Windows often has 0-day vulnerabilities, like the recent .lnk exploit that was found in the wild and took several weeks for Microsoft to patch. Same for ubiquitous web browsers, Adobe products, etc. Wireless routers can have 0-day flaws too; common models like the Linksys WRT54G have had them in the past. In fact, the WRT54G and others right now are susceptible to an attack called "DNS rebinding". If you expect users to keep their wireless routers perfectly secure, you expect them to not use them at all. Generally, perfect security is not currently attainable, so it's not a reasonable expectation.
You're surely right though that the content providers would still see you as responsible. I'm pretty sure they took at least one user to court who claimed they had been hacked. Mediacom isn't responsible for ascertaining someone's guilt anyway; they just follow the DMCA by conveying the accusation and under the DMCA the user has a right to appeal (i.e., counter-notification). I suppose when it comes down to it, legal changes are needed to prevent abuse by content providers.
