If you haven't heard about it recently, America's largest cable company Comcast
has been interfering with BitTorrent
seeding for a while now. They deny it, but several third parties have shown very convincing evidence that Comcast is a bit overzealous when coming to fighting Internet Piracy.
You would expect that they would get away with this, since but a man named Jon Hart decided that he was going to take legal action against the cable giant. So he filed a class-action lawsuit on Tuesday, demanding that Comcast stops interfering with BitTorrent traffic. Also, he wants Comcast to pay all Comcast customers in California damages for not giving him the "crazy fast speeds" that they advertised.
Threat Level asked Comcast for a response on this unexpected lawsuit against Comcast, but the spokesman gave the typical response that Comcast has been telling everyone recently, saying "Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any websites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services". They are not lying with that statement, however, since they are not "blocking" any websites, online applications, or peer-to-peer file sharing applications. They are disconnecting P2P connections so that it is nearly impossible to seed a BitTorrent file.
But Jon Hart isn't the only one (or group) that is getting tired of this... SaveTheInternet, a non-profit organization dedicated to making sure that Net Neutrality isn't overturned, they are demanding that Comcast give each customer affected $195,000. I hope that I get my check from Comcast soon.
From various people that are following this legal battle closely, I have heard that Comcast is using an application developed by a company called Sandvine to kill BitTorrent traffic. Now, this application is installed onto the router, so it can do a lot of damage to BitTorrent seeds. If Jon Hart and SaveTheInternet
succeed in their lawsuits, Comcast is probably going to have to replace all of the routers that have this software on it.
