A Cool Customer

The energy he is stealing is the extra power he is causing to be used by the cooling unit, which is going to his benefit.

If I hook my house up to your house's electricity supply, it's the same thing. Even though you don't have less electricity than you had before, I have caused more to be used that you are paying for and I am taking and benefiting from.

I am in effect causing the electric company to sell you more power, which I am then taking for myself.

If you complained about a neighbor making your product dirty, this judge would say, "No, no, they're actually giving you free dirt!"

The judge's notion that the saline solution acquiring heat from the defendant's cellar equates to production/transportation of energy seems wrong to me.

Heat is not a desirable form of energy in this context, it's either a waste product created by the cooling system, or a naturally occurring element that is counteracted by the saline solution.

Maybe the judge isn't technically wrong, he just got it backwards. The energy here is expended to eliminate heat, while creating it would be the opposite endeavor.

Is this the reason why?

We hit this (what seems to be a) paradoxon in a research project a few years ago, where we modelled production facilities that needed heat and cold at the same time (industrial bakery producing freezed goods, different pipes).

Since our goal was the optimization of energy flows, being able to use e.g. energy recovery of "waste heat", we could easily get paradoxical results, when counting with "hot" and "cold' energies.

The thing is, any medium can potentially carry energy (and in fact does), but if it is "usable" to you, depends on the difference to the environment you want to use it in/against.

400° hot oil? Net plus J in an oven, but net minus J for a chiller.

Yet, generating a certain amount of that hot oil took x Joule. Same goes for cold water or saline solution.

I think the plaintiff's argument was actually very fitting.

Mine is still not technical though.

“Your justice, how about I come to your house on a hot summer day and open all the windows and doors so the heat from the outside could give more energy to your air conditioner”

My understanding is that this is like borrowing water from your house and returning it into your septic system with “gratuitous” waste in it. It’s dumping entropy, or “stealing” a low entropy state on the plantiff. Not sure if this is the technical answer the article wanted though.

The expense was incurred in order to create a thermal gradient; which was diminished by the actions of the thief.

There should be a pretty straightforward relationship between expense and temperature of medium vs environment that would be amenable to simple mathematical manipulations suitable for a court demonstration.

Being that its a court, of course, the facts dont matter and it all hinges on whom each party is related to and which side's lawyers gave the judge the best hookers and likker at the country club.

Thermal energy is heat. Not cold. Heat is being transferred from the retail cellar to the coolant.

The prosecution is right, they are paying to cool the retail cellar. But you can't produce cold, you can only remove heat.

The judge is MORE right, the argument that thermal energy is being stolen is not factual.

I don't see how this heat exchange could have been avoided. Why didn't the beer guy just get some more insulation?

I have to agree with the judge here. The issue is not criminal theft here per the letter of the law. A lot of things that may seem like criminal theft to untrained eyes are not considered theft in the eyes of the law. For example, joyriding usually have to be added as a separate crime to criminal codes because they would not fall under the definition of theft in most jurisdictions.

That being said, the neighbour definitely has a civil case here and it should be easy to win that one.

The neighbor was stealing the coolness of the solution. Coolness was the desired/useful property, and it was taken for use in the neighbors cellar

> The court of appeals ruled: “The saline solution acquires heat from the retailer’s cellar; therefore, energy belonging to the brewery is not being stolen. On the contrary, the brewery is receiving gratuitous energy from the retailer.”

Of course, there are cases where sending gratuitous energy to your neighbor clearly appears to be tortious. Like a high-powered laser weapon.

"Theft of thermal energy" or maybe "thermal state" may be a succinct way to put it. It applies to hot/cool that's being stolen and is agnostic to the energy required to create that temperature. I think that's the challenge here, finding a way to phrase it that would be acceptable to write in a judge's ruling

Defendant was stealing negentropy (negative entropy, or order). Good luck explaining that to a judge!

Alternatively, it could be a claim of vandalism - the defendant didn’t steal anything, but rather damaged the saline by imparting energy on the molecules which disordered them.

I talked to a non-techie friend and they had an interesting idea: that it was like going into a store and upsetting store displays. Creating a "mess" of disorganized matter (heated) that needed to be put back into order (cooled).

Is the retailer rerouting the coolant into his cellar, or just using the fact that his cellar is cold because of the proximity of the pipe?

If the latter, I'd say there is no theft- the brewer needs to insulate his pipe to prevent thermal losses.

Both judges are correct. The brewery needs a better lawyer. By the legal definition of “theft”, this ain’t it. They should sue for tortious interference (or whatever the equivalent under German law).

Nothing was stolen on this episode of the Sopranos either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg-G1E1UwAY

I strongly recommend the 'Futility Closet' podcast that accompanies the website. It is one of the most consistently interesting podcasts out there.

Basically every party that is contributing to the global warming can defend like this.