This year, we are going to boldly say that hotel WiFi landscape has reached an impasse. When we first started doing this report, hotels made our best list for offering up free wireless internet access. The next year, hotels made our best list for offering up free wireless internet access with a high degree of consistency across brands and locations. So we assumed that by 2007, more hotels would be offering free wireless and with greater consistency, seeing that guests love, need and want free WiFi. Alas, that is not what we found.

Instead of finding more and more hotels offering free WiFi, we are finding more restrictions are being added to free hotel WiFi. For instance, you can get free WiFi in the lobby, but in-rooms it’s ethernet and it starts at $9.95. Or you can get free WiFi in your rooms but you need to belong to a hotel’s loyalty program or be assigned a code with a special password. So while wireless networks in hotels has reached near ubiquity, it is amazing that consistent wireless internet access, pricing, and service, is not a given across hotel brands, small hotel groups, or even from the lobby to your room.

Yet, free wireless is still what many hotel guests are after, and hotels still have a great opportunity to gain a loyal following by doing hotel wireless right.

According to the AMC release, Culver City decided to incorporate filtering following an analysis conducted via AMC’s CopySense technology, indicating that Culver City’s open network “included some illegal trading of copyrighted music, movies and other video content, including pornographic videos and access to pornographic web sites.”

The city’s Wi-Fi system, which covers approximately 10 square blocks of the recently renovated Town Plaza, offers citizens and visitors free wireless access, both indoors and outdoors, within the covered area.

“Our campaign initially said ‘free and open Wi-Fi access to everybody,’” said John Richo, Director of IT for Culver City. “As part of the incentive plan to bring pedestrian traffic to Town Plaza, people were quick to sign up, and it was clear this was going to be a popular offering.”

Stanford University law professor Larry Lessig has argued the WiFi clouds popping up across cites from Philadelphia to San Francisco could provide broadband access over the “last mile” between the internet cloud and users’ doorsteps.

Lessig, author and co-leader of the Creative Commons, told LinuxWorld attendees in San Francisco, that unification of the WiFI patchwork would provide an infrastructure that frees the last mile from the “proprietary control” of carriers like AT&T and Verizon. This would restrict carriers’ ability to charge content providers different fees in order to prioritize delivery of their data packets across the internet.

“When one owns the wires as these network operators do, there is a desire to leverage control. To exploit and capture the value up the stack,” Lessig said.

Well, of course, you can be arrested, but it’s unlikely that there would be any legal grounds for the arrest. The latest debate on this issue comes from a tech writer at the Houston Chronicle who is taking Tim Lee to task for an op-ed piece Tim wrote in the New York Times about open WiFi. The Chronicle writer says Tim is missing the real security issue, about how the RIAA can go after you if someone downloads music on your open WiFi. While it is true that they can go after you, there are valid legal defenses for this — as has been discussed for years.