My Physics teacher once told me about someone using a similar technologie in the early days of Radio. Because this was considered Stealing it was banned as illegal, as it influenced the range of the transmitter

At this rate we will soon tap into technology that Tesla understood to be possible 100 years ago. Strange that a man such as he could be left to wither and die without proper compensation and acknowledgement from the profiteers (and society in general) who so greedily used this man and then kicked him to the curb.

RCA already launched a similar product last year called Airnergy.
It can charge a mobile phone & has a USB port out for charging.
It has been commercially available since January 2010.

Many years ago I discovered I could light up an LED by placing it behind a TV aerial in the loft of my parents house. Great I thought we could power all manner of things this way. I was told when I researched it that there was a case of a man who had tried the very same thing and had been prosecuted for stealing electricity from the BBC. His antics had created a shadow of reduced signal behind his house and people had complained about no TV signal.
If it is possible to legally, scavenge EMR and turn it into a useable supply could I run some copper wire round the enclosure of the substation at the end of my garden and power the house from that, or put a load of TV aerials in the loft and light the house with LEDs?

Tesla voluntarily gave up his claims to patent royalties owed to him by the Westinghouse company. It sucks, but he did do so of his own free will. Unfortunately, it came back to haunt him later when he didn\'t have the funds to complete all of his research.
Are all of you who asked about legality from the UK? I live in the US and have never heard of such a thing. I do know that it\'s illegal to decode signals that you\'re not paying for, i.e. satellite t.v. even though it\'s legal for them to bombard everyone with said radiation.

Provided there is no specific Resonant tuning to a particular Transmitter frequency, field strength reduction [shadow-Mike B] should not be a problem.
The tendency to move from multi, non specific frequencies or ambient \'noise Rf\' scavenging, to deliberate theft of those extra milliwatts is going to be a very difficult temptation to avoid.
Cosmic Rf radiation background noise harvesting would be good!

I am not that bright, but I thought that you couldn\'t convert a lower energy wave (IR) into a higher energy form (useful electricity). Doesn\'t that break the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Again, not that bright over here, but if someone could explain how this is NOT a perpetual motion machine (without being a troll, thank you) I would be interested to read it.

\"The Georgia Tech team believe that self-powered, wireless paper-based sensors will soon be widely available at very low cost, making then attractive for a range of applications, such as chemical, biological, heat and stress sensing for defense and industry; radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging for manufacturing and shipping, and monitoring tasks in many fields including communications and power usage.\" ...excuse me but passive RFID tags have been doing EXACTLY what he\'s talking about for over 20 years! And yes, Tesla did it first. So how can they claim IP???

Firefly Technologies invented this harvesting technology in 2005 and was issued a US patent for a broadband wireless power supply. In 2006, the company sold their technology to Powercast, which received an award from the consumer electronics show for best emerging technology in 2007. These guys better do some patent searching before they stake their claim in the wireless power arena as to who did what and when to avoid lawsuits.

This is the basic principles behind a crystal set. If you use a small rectifier circuit with a basic radio receiver, anyone can do this. Use a long antenna such as the guttering around your house :)