Yeah well I think the situation in Germany is not too different from the
rest of the developed world - the framers of laws are usually (low-grade)
lawyers. Self-regard and incompetence is a potent combination.
I'd be interested to know if the jurisdictions where "stealing by finding"
is a felony -- notably UK & Australia (dunno about New England states) --
are applying that law to cover this situation.
I'm no expert but to me the 2.4GHz ISM band hardly seems appropriate or
sufficient for such an anarchic err, enterprise. Are the people who want
to pay for a piece of hopefully useable bandwidth to be drowned out in the
RF cacophony? There are already enough horror stories, e.g. from what I
hear, if you live within a coupla blocks of a hospital, you can't get a
useable channel... signal strength limits be damned.
You may have noticed that in the U.S. the telephone companies created from
the big break-up have incestuously collapsed back into only two significant
operations -- apparently to loud applause and encouragement from those
charged with regulating the system -- who just happen to own a big piece of
the Internet backbone. They're going to get us one way or the other.