Is this captain going to exercise his captain rights to putting you in a brig or keel hauling. This is the very extreemist action that is being talked about. The gps locations on the fishing boat,, were the loations obtained while in the companies employ or part of the captain package when hired or part of the boat when bought. This is 3 different things. And in the case of the sold boat. Why shouldnt the man erase the locations IF the data was his. The buyer bought the boat not the day to day operations. Is the buyer entitled to have the picture of the captialns wife that is on the dashblard also. The boat was sold not the intel aboard, or the mates that go to sea with the boat. If the company wanted to sell that info they should have included it in the inventory of what was being sold. To buy a boat,, it is expected that you get the propulsion with the boat, not the list of favority radiw stations that are listened to........ This is only a guess. The buyer had no need for the boat, What he may have done was to buy the boat after failing to successfully obtain the secure locations by other means. No one here knows the detail of the sale. I certainly would not expect to get the dive locations just because i obtained the boat. That level of expectation is far above the level that is related to this thread. For tha sea captains out there .... What would have happened if the new owner used the waypoints that were in the gps and ran aground. Whose fault???? the new owner of the previous owner. At this point some should say that , that is a different matter all together. This discussion reminds me of the old controversy of the satalite dish. Are you steeling satalite or receiving what is legal to receive. The satalite co's had to go to encrypted data to claim thier rights to the signal content. anyone can receive the data in its useless form. Your cable or satalite payment (in general) is for the decryption codes, not the signal. Perhaps the gps's should be password protected to obtain the data. In that case could the guy have been sued? He had the the way points but just could not access them. Would the previous owner be expected to release access controls that did not affect the operation of the gps as it was provided by the manufacturer? These points can be argued forever. One thing for sure is this. No boat captain will ever be willing to relinquish any legal or perceived power or authority related to his vessel. Including the information on how many rolls of tp are on boatrd.
A couple more examples.
1. A car pulls up near your house and sits there for 20 minutes. The house owner calls the cops. The cops find out he is downloading kiddie porn via your wireless connection. The FBI shows up and arrests the car owner for possesion and the home owner for operating a non-secured network. Had the homeowner used some filtering of any kind he would be off the hook ,,,, but because the system has no security the info is public domain and the home owner bears the responsibility of having the open system that provided the means to obtain the porn. The guy in the car did not dwonload it your system downloaded it. The difference is in whether the homeowners system was hacked or not to commit the porn crime.
From that example the law says that what is in the air/internet is free to take. The car did not violate any authorized access policy because non was in place. I will fully agree that on a boat the information that is on the boat is the domain of the boat. My passage does not allow access to location information by means of utilizing the ships equipment. In other words the boat is a taxi, I can not go under the hood. My fare does not buy that access. That is why boat operators will cover the location readouts when on site. Equally the taxi driver cant tell you to not look out the right window because doing so will tell the passsenger where he is.
2. A group of 4 shoppers go to 4 different grocery stores. theya are all on conference call with their govt paid for cell phone. They proceed down each isle and the conversation proceeds like this. Bounty paprer towels 298 for the 150 towel pack skew num ######. (pause) ok you buy that i will get the paper plates here. What RIGHTS do the store manager have to stop this practice as it, in this case, clearly is designed to cut into the owners revenues. Which leads into spoofers and call blockers ect.
Another one for the boat captains. How many of you have the dod charts that show war sunken ships. Ideally the answer is none. Those charts are safegaurded. Does that need to protect the locations of certain sunken vessels/containers/items prohibit the looking for them by those who do not have the charts. No.
I think the owners have this unreal expectation of secracy. Unreal because technology has made that expectation unatainable. We are no longer on sailing ships using rudimentary charts. And the location to treasure if on the chart would not lead you to the location. at best the island or area. The actual locations were obtained by local land marks. The intersection of north of the mounrtain peak and west of the water fall 30 paces from the only pine tree is the X in the sand. One had only to keep the local/island position data secret to protect ones tresure. If you dont want anyone to know you,, dont go there when the enemy is around. NOw we have satalite, you think you are alone but there is a picture of you or the ground disturbance where you once were. We divers do not care enough to go to these extreems. Why should we ,,,we have our cell phone's ect. to let us know. The locations are like guns. the harm comes from thier use. 99.999% do not use the info in a mannor that would be harmfull to the owners. The extent the concern is on par with being denied phone usage at the location of the police station because some could use that location for targeting info.
