The more interesting legal analogy is probably water rights. If the state decides to protect the power line, it will be illegal to draw power without permission, regardless of the physical circumstances.
You're very confused. And posting incorrect statements all over this thread. If you're excited about questions of legality, maybe you'd be interested in attending law school to learn more about the topic?
Enforcement and legality are separate things. Many people break the law under the assumption they will not be prosecuted. They're still breaking the law.
That's OK. But it's worth knowing because eventually enough of those small choices add up to something that does trigger the laws attention.
There's another reason this behavior might elicit enforcement: in many cases, failure to enforce property rights can become grounds for losing rights or being unable to enforce them in other contexts. So a large company may have an incentive to go after someone like this just to make sure that other people don't start doing more ambitious versions of this.
Your stance here is ridiculous. Common sense says it's wrong to arrest and/or prosecute people over such a trivial matter.
So much for all your supposed "justifications" for doing so. Have you completely lost all sense of proportionality here? Or has the legal system gone completely bonkers, then? Or are you trying to gaslight me?
We're talking about 0.1 watts of electricity being "stolen" at most.
