bittorrent

Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits within the next few days in three countries--including the United States--against The Pirate Bay, CNET News.com has learned.

One of the world's best-known BitTorrent indexing sites, The Pirate Bay has defiantly linked to pirated copies of films, TV shows, music videos, and other content while often boasting that it ignores Hollywood's requests to remove them. The Pirate Bay does not host any unauthorized content, but the service is internationally famous for being a highly effective file-sharing tool.

Prince will file similar … Read more

Episode 597: Duh. Google phone.

FCC urged to stop Comcast Internet blocking

Members of the SavetheInternet.com Coalition and Internet scholars from Harvard, Yale and Stanford law schools filed a petition and complaint with the Federal Communications Commission Thursday in response to claims that Comcast is blocking some kinds of peer-to-peer traffic.

The complaint comes after the Associated Press discovered, based on its own testing, that content was blocked on several Comcast broadband connections using the peer-to-peer filing sharing network BitTorrent. Other Comcast users have also complained that their BitTorrent content has been blocked.

In their petition, the groups claim that Comcast is violating the FCC's Internet Policy Statement, which essentially … Read more

From driving to file-sharing, the Brits do it backwards

Ever since Napster found its way into every college dorm room in 1999, the defenders of intellectual property have been perplexed at how to best deal with peer-to-peer file transfer. Last week's news that Comcast's servers were interfering with BitTorrent traffic may have come as a surprise to some, but given that few companies have been willing to acknowledge the legal uses for P2P, it shouldn't be too much of a shock.

What strikes me is the fact that in the United Kingdom, it is actually the ISPs who are opposed to banning file-sharing and the lawmakers who have been pushing it. According to Broadband Reports, a representative from the service providers union suggested that, "ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope." While this argument seems somewhat weak given Comcast's ability to infiltrate BitTorrent, it is true that file-sharers will always be one step ahead of the regulators, and I support their commitment toward an open internet.

Senators want probe of Comcast's BitTorrent 'discrimination'

Comcast's reportedly aggressive filtering of BitTorrent and other file-sharing traffic is drawing calls for a U.S. Senate hearing--and a renewed push for Net neutrality laws.

Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) on Friday sent a letter asking Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) to convene a hearing as soon as possible to investigate "the topic of service discrimination by phone and cable companies."

The request isn't new: Dorgan and Snowe both made a similar plea after reports that Verizon Wireless had initially refused to carry a reproductive rights group's text messages.

The senators … Read more