Comcast Wins Protest Against “Shake Down” of BitTorrent Pirates
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Comcast charges $45 per IP address for civil cases. Prenda was late with payments in another case and the dispute even made the court docket. Comcast said to the court they discussed payment terms with Duffy (Prenda's main counsel) and resolved their differences.
I do not know if Prenda ever ended up paying Comcast, but Comcast's refusal to comply to me seem more rooted in the costs to their legal department than to protecting their customers.
Comcast had no problem giving out thousands of customer's information for two years to these black mailers until recently. The merits of the case have never changed. They sue people in favorable jurisdictions and only Comcast could have stepped forward with the contact information and fought that with real evidence.
Kudos to Comcast, but don't consider them for sainthood yet.
http://ia600806.us.archive.org/25/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.152...
On February 2, 2012, AF Holdings served the Subpoena on Comcast. Fourteen days later, on February 16, 2012, Comcast objected to the Subpoena on four separate grounds: inadequate time for compliance, inadequate assurance of payment, improper joinder and lack of personal jurisdiction. After a good faith meet-and-confer conference on the same day, Comcast agreed to withdraw its objection regarding assurance of payment, but indicated it would stand on its remaining objections.
--- It's more recent, so they also raised other issues other than non-payment. The inadequate time issue is relating to staffing while joinder and lack of jurisdiction, I do commend comcast for fighting.
That said, I'm a customer. They're my only good choice in broadband. And honestly I've been reasonably pleased -- it's reliable and fast, if not cheap.
> clear violations of the network neutrality principle by discounting their partners' content over their IP network
That's isn't real. They are not doing that. Someone analyzed their TV over IP service a little while ago and verified it.
> the scale still tips toward the "evil" side for Comcast
Not me. They were evil when they did the bittorrent thing, but ever since then they've been great.
But the network neutrality thing is very much real. They enforce a cap on general traffic, but lift it for partner streaming. That's a discount. The analysis merely showed that the packets were distinctly labeled for the routers, and thus they were (plausibly, technically) within the letter of network neutrality. They were quite clearly violating the spirit.
They don't prioritize it over other traffic - it uses a totally different channel which you pay extra to get. It's exactly what they should be doing.
> The analysis merely showed that the packets were distinctly labeled for the routers
No, that's not correct. The packets used a different DOCSIS channel, after the cable modem the packets were not special.
If the packets went over your regular connection AND were prioritized, then that would be a violation. Anything else is not a violation, not the letter, not the spirit.
Comcast is a video provider, I bought some video and they used their wires to provide it to me. Other providers don't have the same access to the customer, but that's because they have no wires to the customer.
For network neutrality, other providers should have the same internet access as the customer as comcast, but this service doesn't use your internet connection, so network neutrality simply doesn't apply.
On the other hand, given the lack of a written opinion, it's possible the Court didn't care about this "shakedown" aspect of the argument at all, and instead quashed the subpoenas for some more technical reason, like the improper-joinder argument that the article mentions.
What Comcast characterizes as "shakedowns" are really just negotiated settlements. The fact that the claims didn't go to litigation doesn't necessarily indicate that they aren't valid; it just means that they were settled before it became necessarily to file a lawsuit.
Here's proof from Prenda itself in a court filing: "Although our records indicate that we have filed suits against individual copyright infringement defendants, our records indicate that no defendants have been served in the below-listed cases."
http://www.scribd.com/doc/83287284 (page 4 - all cases)