Comcast has only recently started fighting back against this one law firm (Prenda) because they were not promptly paying Comcast's fee for handing over subscriber information.
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.
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.
The fact that Comcast is carrying this banner almost makes me want to switch to Comcast in support. I say "almost" because I quickly remember their frequent random connection drops, slower-than-promised speeds, intentionally misleading promotional advertising, legendarily bad customer service, and ruthless nationwide campaign against affordable municipally-provided high speed Internet access.
Also: DNS response forgery, bittorrent throttling via packet inspection and clear violations of the network neutrality principle by discounting their partners' content over their IP network. I'm as pleased as anyone with this, but honestly I think the scale still tips toward the "evil" side for Comcast.
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.
Also: Very easy to disable DNS forgery (unlike some), DNSsec on their entire network (which also disables the DNS forgery, but they knew that), IPv6, and since they got hit so hard on the bittorent thing, they won't dare do it again - which makes them perfect.
> 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.
Most of that is a judgement call, and I won't argue.
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 do the same thing for PPV. It makes no difference that it's TCP/IP vs some other protocol. Those packets do not flow over your internet connection, they flow over the dedicated wires comcast runs to the customer specific for video.
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.
Do you have a link for that analysis (I'm too lazy to check)? I swear you're wrong on that. I quite clearly remember that the packets were tagged with QoS fields on the local ethernet. Whether they go over a different provisioned channel or not isn't really the point. Clearly they're taking hardware they installed for general internet service and repurposing it for a private, privileged traffic. That traffic is "internet" traffic on teh local network, and it's "internet" traffic at the backend (where it's sourced from Xfinity partners networks over lines that I'm 100% sure aren't dedicated). How can you possibly not feel that this is a violation of the spirit of net neutrality?
This article doesn't mention it, but I wonder whether the fact that plaintiffs were pornography producers (http://paidcontent.org/2012/06/20/comcast-crushes-porn-owner...) was relevant to the court's decision. The decision is just a one-paragraph notice saying "for reasons stated in open court...", so it's hard to know. But I could see the Court being more worried about discovery being used for harassment in such a context.
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.
Even if there is no relevant legal precedent, Comcast's common sense argument that the plaintiff in the case had a clear history of not using the identities of the subscribers the court compelled ISPs to release in any litigation is the kind of argument that, in a perfect world, would become the norm. However, IANAL so I have no idea how likely it is to be successfully used again.
I don't know, man - I'm no ally of the Plaintiffs in this case, but I don't think I buy that argument.
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.
This one law firm has had cases against tens of thousands of internet users. To this date they have never served a single one.
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."
I guess now I know where comcast has been spending my subscription fees. Apparently on very expensive lawyers. Now if comcast would only upgrade there service so American broadband would be more comparable to Sweden or Japan.
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.