People on that forum are trying to call this "stealing", which is ridiculous. This involves less that 1 watt of power. The law should not concern itself with trifles. It's more of a health and safety issue than any "theft".
They don't seem to get the nuance of the situation and can only see it in terms of black and white and following "the rules". I've personally seen this behavior a lot in the amateur radio community, where people were harassed or threatened for breaking some minor rule.
You should see what hooligans in Belarus and Russia get up to, now that is a legitimate problem:
I would think that using a transformer so that one need not physically connect a wire wouldn’t necessarily change that (it would if the law in question mentions that connection a conductor is needed)
This is a sort of transformer (a very bad one, but still one), so I think many jurisdictions still would call it stealing. Whether they would think it worthy of prosecution is a different question.
I think the point they're making is that whilst it is technically stealing, it is such a small amount.
Stealing a grape from the supermarket vs robbing a supermarket of all its fruit and veg. There's bigger fish to fry and the world doesn't have enough time and resources to go after or worry about such things.
If in your jurisdiction there is a law against this then it is useful to be aware of it. This is not passing judgement, this is being informed. Then, you make your own informed decision and can argue your case if you get caught.
I suppose that one angle is not that one person is extracting a very small amount, it is that if you allow it then everyone can do the same.
Then they can start cracking down on the problem if it becomes widespread. But not when it isn't.
When the punishment far exceeds the loss caused by the "crime" then it is absolutely unfair, it undermines the rule of law itself.
Just being arrested over it could be considered punishment itself. Especially if it's a young person who gets into trouble, it is traumatic for them. It is also sending the message that the system itself is unjust, and he/she might not think twice before committing a real crime, e.g. real theft or fraud when he/she grows up.
Copying files is absolutely not stealing since it doesn’t remove something from the owner. Stealing is conventional bad not because the thief acquires something, but because the original owner is deprived of something. I’d be pissed if someone stole cash from me even if they burn it. It’s not that they now have my property, it’s that I * no longer have* my property that’s the issue.
In the case of piracy, the original owner still has their property. So I’m sorry but “theft” is simply the wrong word. The original owner is not deprived of their data.
In the case of the fence however, the original owner is indeed deprived of some modicum of energy. The energy is indeed *taken*, or removed from the original owner. Thus I do consider this “theft”. It’s also true that it’s a trivial amount.
Well, there is this cool physics/art installation of 1301 fluorescent tubes being lit by high-voltage lines [0].
There is the story I heard about early in the history of long-distance high-tension lines someone building an inductive coil to harvest electricity, and getting convicted of theft, which seem legit, since it is coupling with the lines and pulling more power than the grasses & ground would pull. There are also various references available online to cases, but the readily available ones don't seem to link to any court case (e.g., [1]).
I saw some back-of-the-envelope calculations about it being on the scale of 25 millivolts/mile, so you'd need quite a coil to get anything more useful than powering a bulb. Anyone with better calculations or actual measurements?
If you attach a load to an electrical line, then you are transferring power from the line for your use. This power is then no longer available for paying customers to use.
The load in question here is an inductive load, coupled through the air to the transmission line through well known physical principles.
If caught, you could be charged with theft for sure.
This is regardless of what people are doing or not doing in Belarus or Russia.
Yes, caught for "stealing" 63 milliwatts of electricity, from charging the 88uF capacitor in that video from 426V to 489V over a period of 40 seconds.
If that was running all year round it would consume 0.6kWh of electricity, which is probably capacitive losses to the surroundings and would be lost anyway.
If it ever got to court, it would be thrown out instantly.
This is the same mentality behind thousands of bullshit complaints to the FCC by radio amateurs because someone broke a petty rule somewhere, and it's why I want nothing to do with the amateur radio hobby at all. The vast majority of them the FCC ignores.
This isnt a one way argument. If this is stealing so is pollution reducing throughput sabotage. Prosecuting one but not the other is a value judgement which gets us to the nature of laws. They are not an end in itself and often times so stupid they get changed when unintended implications become clear.
>At least here in germany, it is unclear whether "stealing" via induction is really stealing, the corresponding law explicitly states that a conductor is necessary. There have been lots of urban myths about it being forbidden, but the fact is that near lots of high power mid wave radio stations you automatically "steal" lots of power, e.g. just by having a neon tube installed in the "correct" direction.
"Taking a single grape at the supermarket is illegal but no one would arrest you for it."
Petty crime can have serious consequences regardless. In Germany we had a famous case, where a supermarket cashier redeemed a deposit receipt worth 1.30 EUR a customer had forgotten.
She was let go without notice for that and only got her job back after fighting through three instances. Only the highest court found the termination disproportionate and only because she had been working this job for 31 years.There was never a debate if this was stealing or not, just if the termination proportionate .
And those are just the ones that are so obvious the POTUS needed to make a statement.
Corporations steal trillions through dark patterns, intentiona obfuscation, mailicious marketing, price fixing, collusion, fraud etc.
Every piece of personal data shared between every online entity I have no relation to, or awareness of - is stealing from me.
stealing, in this case is a broad, vulgar term.
If you don't like stealing - then you wont get any place in successful business it would seem, based on the observable, documented, litigated and governmental precedents throughout history.
The HV lines run over someone's property, which implies there is some sort of contract in place, that presumably spells out what the property owner is allowed or not allowed to do. I'm not sure if this would be any kind of criminal issue instead of a private dispute.
Lol, the name of that channel ("Elektryka Prąd Nie Tyka") is a Polish saying, "electricity doesn't touch the electrician". I guess these hooligans weren't electricians!
Peter Gibbons: Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's, uh, it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot.
I think what drives some of the comments that it is illegal is a little bit of righteous indignation. "How dare you get free electricity, that's illegal because I'm not getting free electricity." It's kind of fake moral outrage
Also power trips (especially by radio hams) and territoriality (impinging on "their" spectrum). It really is animal behavior there, people are supposed to react better than that when such trivial "offenses" happen.
If there's deliberate high powered jamming going on, it's a completely different matter.
During the Dot-com bubble, I remember a startup in Germany that placed boxes under high-voltage transmission lines to measure the current and sold that data to analysts.
Never heard of them again, so I guess in the long run it was either cheaper to buy that data.
Network frequency changes and fluctuates around 50hz. This change is random and unique. It is also captured on video/audio recording as background hum.
This data is quite valuable. You can reconstruct exact time (and region) when any video was taken.
There is a lot of interest at the moment in monitoring lines. The capacity of a line can change due to things like weather conditions. The capacity is rated based on a conservative set of assumptions. Sensors mean that they could send more power safely. This could help connect more renewable power.
If the current is indeed enough to cause the tube to glow, touching the air-end of the tube with your finger will increase the coupling with the overhead lines (you're salt water - good conductor) and the brightness will increase. Personally, I don't like to walk under HV power lines. I know it's safe. And yet, so very unsettling to think of the sea of power being waded through.
I love this so much because there's no contact, but because the voltage on the power line is so high, the inductive power is not only measurable, but significant. I have no idea what the legality of stealing power wirelessly (potentially obliviously), but it is undoubtedly cool.
I couldn't find it, but I think French courts have a jurisprudence on this already (unless it's an internal urban legend from EDF, who knows): one day a EDF (French electricity producer) who was living close to a power line built an “antenna” like this to harvest electricity, and he bragged about it. EDF sued, and the defendant claimed that he was just collecting electromagnetic waves that were leaving anyway, but EDF and the experts summoned by the court argued that it wasn't the case and that he was in fact draining power. He was found guilty because he was doing that on purpose, and even if he believed it was doing no harm, he should have checked beforehand especially since he was working in the field he should have been able to know or at least get the information about what was going on if he checked.
There is a housing estate near me that has these lines going right through it. I often wonder what the impact of that is on the people that live there.
There was a lot of talk about a link between people living near high voltage lines and leukaemia back in the 90s. There have been various studies which have a correlation, but I don't believe anyone has managed to find a causation.
The main advantage is that you don't need to pay for electricity for lighting.
Now the disadvantages: most electrical equipment and the human body are not build to function in a continous (as in always present) electromagnetic field.
They said they collected 36J which is around 0.01 watt-hour, so this is not something you'd be using to power your house.
There's stories of farmers building coils to harvest power from powerlines to run their house or barn, but I'd be surprised if they were true unless the coils were built very close to the powerline.
A really nice example. I tracked the data acquisition and fit an ordinary charging curve. For anyone interested, a 25 line script w/ data is here: https://pastebin.com/R0b1XSV0
Some insights:
- The peak DC voltage seems to be around 1.15 kV.
- The time constant is around 440 s. If you were to assume a simple RC-circuit with a constant voltage source (which it probably isnt), you would end at around 100 Ohm for the resistor.
- The start of the charging curve is not at the same time as in the video indicating that some voltage was already present from experiments before the video
Also, I am pretty sure it is not inductive coupling but capacitive because of several reasons:
- It doesn't look like a coax cable but more like an ordinary thick wire.
- I am pretty sure he didn't ground the cable at the far end and thus did not create a loop necessary for induction. And if he were, inductive coupling with ground in between would result in a very large voltage drop
- If it were inductive: A single loop covering that little area would need way more turns than just one.
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They don't seem to get the nuance of the situation and can only see it in terms of black and white and following "the rules". I've personally seen this behavior a lot in the amateur radio community, where people were harassed or threatened for breaking some minor rule.
You should see what hooligans in Belarus and Russia get up to, now that is a legitimate problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4zO2gB70ps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqRT7J86rco
I strongly disagree. Many jurisdictions call it theft to tap off electricity, even though no electrons are taken (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_theft, https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/power-th...)
I would think that using a transformer so that one need not physically connect a wire wouldn’t necessarily change that (it would if the law in question mentions that connection a conductor is needed)
This is a sort of transformer (a very bad one, but still one), so I think many jurisdictions still would call it stealing. Whether they would think it worthy of prosecution is a different question.
Stealing a grape from the supermarket vs robbing a supermarket of all its fruit and veg. There's bigger fish to fry and the world doesn't have enough time and resources to go after or worry about such things.
I suppose that one angle is not that one person is extracting a very small amount, it is that if you allow it then everyone can do the same.
When the punishment far exceeds the loss caused by the "crime" then it is absolutely unfair, it undermines the rule of law itself.
Just being arrested over it could be considered punishment itself. Especially if it's a young person who gets into trouble, it is traumatic for them. It is also sending the message that the system itself is unjust, and he/she might not think twice before committing a real crime, e.g. real theft or fraud when he/she grows up.
love those crazy russian youtubers, they're always so reckless... they're fun to watch from a safe distance
In the case of piracy, the original owner still has their property. So I’m sorry but “theft” is simply the wrong word. The original owner is not deprived of their data.
In the case of the fence however, the original owner is indeed deprived of some modicum of energy. The energy is indeed *taken*, or removed from the original owner. Thus I do consider this “theft”. It’s also true that it’s a trivial amount.
Well, there is this cool physics/art installation of 1301 fluorescent tubes being lit by high-voltage lines [0].
There is the story I heard about early in the history of long-distance high-tension lines someone building an inductive coil to harvest electricity, and getting convicted of theft, which seem legit, since it is coupling with the lines and pulling more power than the grasses & ground would pull. There are also various references available online to cases, but the readily available ones don't seem to link to any court case (e.g., [1]).
I saw some back-of-the-envelope calculations about it being on the scale of 25 millivolts/mile, so you'd need quite a coil to get anything more useful than powering a bulb. Anyone with better calculations or actual measurements?
[0] https://jimonlight.com/2009/03/01/field-by-richard-box/
[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23799/has-anyon...
The load in question here is an inductive load, coupled through the air to the transmission line through well known physical principles.
If caught, you could be charged with theft for sure.
This is regardless of what people are doing or not doing in Belarus or Russia.
If that was running all year round it would consume 0.6kWh of electricity, which is probably capacitive losses to the surroundings and would be lost anyway.
If it ever got to court, it would be thrown out instantly.
This is the same mentality behind thousands of bullshit complaints to the FCC by radio amateurs because someone broke a petty rule somewhere, and it's why I want nothing to do with the amateur radio hobby at all. The vast majority of them the FCC ignores.
edit: Someone posted https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/23799/has-anyon... a bit down with the following comment that highlights this quite well.
>At least here in germany, it is unclear whether "stealing" via induction is really stealing, the corresponding law explicitly states that a conductor is necessary. There have been lots of urban myths about it being forbidden, but the fact is that near lots of high power mid wave radio stations you automatically "steal" lots of power, e.g. just by having a neon tube installed in the "correct" direction.
Deleted Comment
2. Its a tiny amount of power
Both can be true. Taking a single grape at the supermarket is illegal but no one would arrest you for it.
Petty crime can have serious consequences regardless. In Germany we had a famous case, where a supermarket cashier redeemed a deposit receipt worth 1.30 EUR a customer had forgotten.
She was let go without notice for that and only got her job back after fighting through three instances. Only the highest court found the termination disproportionate and only because she had been working this job for 31 years.There was never a debate if this was stealing or not, just if the termination proportionate .
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2022/10/26/the...
And those are just the ones that are so obvious the POTUS needed to make a statement.
Corporations steal trillions through dark patterns, intentiona obfuscation, mailicious marketing, price fixing, collusion, fraud etc.
Every piece of personal data shared between every online entity I have no relation to, or awareness of - is stealing from me.
stealing, in this case is a broad, vulgar term.
If you don't like stealing - then you wont get any place in successful business it would seem, based on the observable, documented, litigated and governmental precedents throughout history.
Peter Gibbons: Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's, uh, it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot.
If there's deliberate high powered jamming going on, it's a completely different matter.
Dead Comment
You should ask a lawyer. /s
Never heard of them again, so I guess in the long run it was either cheaper to buy that data.
This data is quite valuable. You can reconstruct exact time (and region) when any video was taken.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_network_frequency_a...
https://electrek.co/2023/12/07/heimdall-power-meteomatics-gr...
Gets turned into an art project now and then: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/madeinbristol/2004/02/...
If the current is indeed enough to cause the tube to glow, touching the air-end of the tube with your finger will increase the coupling with the overhead lines (you're salt water - good conductor) and the brightness will increase. Personally, I don't like to walk under HV power lines. I know it's safe. And yet, so very unsettling to think of the sea of power being waded through.
http://www.infoniac.com/environment/artist-created-network-o...
This exam question is based on a news story about a farmer using a coil of wire to power his farm.
https://users.physics.unc.edu/~deardorf/phys25/rwp/exam1rwps...
There may be no physical contact but induction still causes energy to be extracted from the line.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstracting_electricity
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7460-large-study-link...
Your cellphone transmits at 1 watt and you put that at a distance of zero from your brain and reproductive organs.
If you are worrying about power lines you should worry about cell phones too
Now the disadvantages: most electrical equipment and the human body are not build to function in a continous (as in always present) electromagnetic field.
Deleted Comment
There's stories of farmers building coils to harvest power from powerlines to run their house or barn, but I'd be surprised if they were true unless the coils were built very close to the powerline.
https://www.industrytap.com/electromagnetic-harvesters-free-...
Some insights:
- The peak DC voltage seems to be around 1.15 kV.
- The time constant is around 440 s. If you were to assume a simple RC-circuit with a constant voltage source (which it probably isnt), you would end at around 100 Ohm for the resistor.
- The start of the charging curve is not at the same time as in the video indicating that some voltage was already present from experiments before the video
Also, I am pretty sure it is not inductive coupling but capacitive because of several reasons:
- It doesn't look like a coax cable but more like an ordinary thick wire.
- I am pretty sure he didn't ground the cable at the far end and thus did not create a loop necessary for induction. And if he were, inductive coupling with ground in between would result in a very large voltage drop - If it were inductive: A single loop covering that little area would need way more turns than just one.
tl;dr
Electricity kills all bugs and insects good and bad, lowering pesticide use. They also increase water evaporation, forcing plants to grow faster.