UK pub fined because of customer's illegal filesharing

CNET picked up a scary story from its UK sister site ZDNet UK about a pub (that's English for bar) being dinged because a customer used its open WiFi network to download copyrighted material.

Questions about liability in an open internet connection plague us on this side of the Atlantic, too. Copyright holders have put pressure on Internet Service Providers to police the users on their networks; current copyright law in the US limits the liability of service providers.

It will be interesting to see if Internet cafes (or pubs) will begin to either close their networks or stop offering them altogether as a result of this action.