In response to yesterday's news that a man was arrested in London for accessing an unsecured Wi-Fi network, ZDNet's George Ou wonders, "Can owning a Wi-Fi skype phone land you in jail?"

"I was reviewing a Wi-Fi enabled Skype phone and an interesting thing happened when I took it on a trip," Ou writes. "I was in an unfamiliar place and someone rang my review Skype phone and I answered the call as if I had a cell phone. But wait a minute, how did I manage to get a connection? After some further investigation I determined that the phone was automatically configured to connect any 'open' (read unsecured) Wi-Fi network it can find."

Since connecting to any open network is the phone's the default setting, that's likely to happen to many users - and in the U.K., that's illegal. Yes, the man who was arrested recently had used the same network over and over again, but the law's ridiculously unclear on this issue, particularly since computers and Wi-Fi phones often associate to nearby networks on their own without the user's awareness or control.

"It's another one of those issues that the law is grossly behind on," Ou writes - and I couldn't agree more.