A felony for using a free WiFi Connection

In my media law class, we discussed the rights of intrustion and appropriation. It's was pretty boring until my professor brought up this article about a man who was almost convicted of a felony for using a free WiFi signal at a local coffee shop in Michigan. He used the WiFi signal from his car on his lunch break and a cop came to ask him what he was doing and the man in the car freely admitted that he was using the WiFi to surf the internet and check his email.

It's intimidating to think that for using a WiFi connection you could be convicted of a felony. The sad part about this is that I use a free WiFi to connect to the internet. This just goes to show that with all the new technology coming out much of it is free, but we should all be careful as to if what we use that is "free" is really so. There are laws that come with all of these new technologies and just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's free.