I like your scenario. I am curious though, lets say this issue went to court and the airline was charging the wifi 'thief' with stealing.
The case would only pertain to the single flight the thief stole internet access on. And on that particular flight, regardless of whether or not the thief paid or didn't pay he would be reducing the available bandwidth to other customers. Sure in the long run the airline can play with the pricing of their service to try and limit the number of active users on any given flight, however the price of the service would be locked for any single flight.
So doesn't kleiba's analogy of illegal file sharing still stand?
IANAL, so take the legality of this with a grain of salt:
The airline would not have the right to charge the "thief" because the airline is not the victim. The only people able to charge the polluter (sticking with my other analogy) are those who paid for access to the network or someone representing them. They wouldn't do this because 1) it's kind of a ridiculous thing to do, and 2) the damages are far smaller than the cost of taking action.
The sensible way to do this (if stopping the practice outright was impractical) would be to grant some authority (the airline) the power to issue citations related to the pollution. It's then carried out similarly to regulating noise pollution. This is problematic, of course, because it requires identifying offenders. If we can identify offenders, we can simply stop the offense, so issuing any kind of ticket no longer makes sense.
This brings me back to a point I made above: the airlines will stop this practice. It's solvable, profitable, and generally beneficial to those who want it enough to pay.
The case would only pertain to the single flight the thief stole internet access on. And on that particular flight, regardless of whether or not the thief paid or didn't pay he would be reducing the available bandwidth to other customers. Sure in the long run the airline can play with the pricing of their service to try and limit the number of active users on any given flight, however the price of the service would be locked for any single flight.
So doesn't kleiba's analogy of illegal file sharing still stand?