
 Comcast Protests “Shake Down” of Alleged BitTorrent Pirates - cpeterso
https://torrentfreak.com/comcast-protests-shake-down-of-alleged-bittorrent-pirates-120612/
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geuis
I'm... confused. I've been under the clear impression for years that Comcast,
my service provider, was doing everything in its power to quash bittorrent
users. Its been accused of everything from packet shaping to cooperating with
the NSA to "spy" on its customers. I've been living under the assumption that
at any point my service could be interrupted, slowed, or disconnected because
of my occasional torrent use (linux iso's, game of thrones, etc).

While I'm not entirely sure how to take this news, it is certainly food for
thought.

It makes sense that Comcast is fighting back primarily for financial reasons,
more than trying to protect their customers. The sheer volume of subpoenas
must be costing them a lot of money and does nothing to endear us to them.

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iwwr
Comcast cares about the issue because these requests are costing it money. But
if the government should compensate them (as they do for phone tapping), no
further protests would occur.

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ars
They are also worried about reputation. A bad reputation costs them users.
Standing up for users gets more customers.

If they could do these things in secret you might be right, but the subpoenas
are public. And their objection is even more public.

I love that the reaction of their customers drives their policies, that's
exactly what I want in a company.

~~~
iwwr
Reputation counts for little in their virtual local monopolies. Many places
it's either them or 3g or satellite. Then again, the public at large doesn't
care about these issues.

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ars
No, they usually compete with Verizon, AT&T and other local telco's.

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maratd
Only in metro areas and suburbs. In most other places, it's a single provider
and you're _lucky_ if that provider decides to offer service to your house.

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smoyer
If Comcast only held the IP address currently assigned to its cable modems,
they could argue that they don't know who had that IP address six months ago.
Its true that most people leave their cable modems on-line full-time and that
the lease period keeps changes to a minimum, but why keep logs. And it could
all be done "in an effort to store less customer data" ... there are obviously
privacy issues with customer data ;)

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ryegye24
At the moment they would be able to do that, but there are bills constantly
being introduced (and so far, luckily, shot down) to Congress calling for
mandatory data retention. The current bill calling for this is HR
1981:Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011
(<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr1981>), introduced by Rep Lamar
Smith of SOPA acclaim.

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andrewparker
Comcast is a content owner by virtue of owning NBC. I wonder if Comcast is
treating NBC differently or not in this process.

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pyre
The article specifically mentioned that they were resisting subpoenas from
pornographers. I don't know if the author was intentionally implying that
Comcast is ok with other content owners making requests, or if currently the
only people making these mass subpoenas happen to be pornographers.

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CodeMage
Flagged as a duplicate. Please stop sneaking duplicates past the filter
through tricks such as replacing "http" with "https".

Previous submission: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4106269>

~~~
Flenser
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