Congressman to Comcast: Stop interfering with BitTorrent
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In interview with CNET, Rep. Rick Boucher becomes the first U.S. politician to take a public stance against cable giant's blocking of BitTorrent file sharing.
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Philip Corwin has one of the least enviable jobs in Washington, DC: He defends file-swapping networks. That&#39;s not a trivial task for Corwin, the lobbyist for Kazaa&#39;s parent company.
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(InfoWorld) - Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, advocated that the U.S. Congress protect net neutrality and questioned the value of DRM (digital rights management) Thursday. Berners-Lee, speaking before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in the U.S. House of Representatives, said it was "very, very important" for lawmakers to protect the ability of users to access the Web content they want regardless of their ISP. Berners-Lee didn't endorse specific net neutrality proposals largely supported by congressional Democrats, but he said the Web as a communications medium deserves "special treatment" to protect its nondiscriminatory approach to content. While he was growing up in the U.K., there were high penalties for interfering with mail delivery because mail was one of the main ways to communicate, Berners-Lee said. Now, the Web is a major communications medium worthy of protections, he said. One company or country shouldn't control access to the Web, he added. "We are a society only in as much as we are individuals communicating," said Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Consortium and author of the first version of HTML. For the past two years, many e-commerce companies and consumer groups have called on Congress to pass a law prohibiting broadband carriers from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors or from speeding up partners' content. In mid-2005, the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Communications Commission freed broadband providers from nondiscriminatory carriage rules, and net neutrality backers say large broadband providersÂ like Verizon and ComcastÂ will now be tempted to provide tiered speeds based on which Internet companies pay them the most. Broadband providers and many Republicans have opposed a net neutrality law, andÂ efforts to pass one failed in a Republican-controlled Congress in 2006. Democrats took over Congress this year. While Berners-Lee didn't hear a lot of opposition to his net neutrality comments at the hearing, Representative Mary Bono, a California Republican, challenged his assertion that DRM copy protections could hinder the growth of some parts of the Web. Berners-Lee called for open standards instead of closed DRM technologies. Instead of DRM, copyright holders should "allow people to do the right thing" by providing the information on how to legally use the material, he said. Bono questioned if his idea would prevent mass stealing of copyright materials. "Is that not the equivalent of having a speed limit but not enforcing the speed limit?" she asked. But Berners-Lee suggested DRM limits the market for digital music downloads, echoing recent statements by AppleÂ CEO Steve Jobs. "What is the enforcement for speeding?" he said. "The enforcement for is not that the car grinds to a halt. [Instead of DRM] I'm inclined to make software to allow people to do the right thing first." But Bono said strong protections for digital content are needed. "With great respect to Steve Jobs, he's trying to sell hardware, first and foremost," she said. "I wonder if he would feel the same way about his patents being on the Internet free of patent protection."
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Grist to the Viacom-YouTube mill? A permanent injunction has been imposed on the distributor of the Morpheus file-sharing software. A US court ruled yesterday that StreamCast Inc. must use "the most effective means available to reduce the infringing capabilities of the system."â¦
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Comcast Corp said on Monday that file  transfers on peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent may be  delayed by bandwidth management technology, but it denied  blocking access to any applications or content.
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The inventor of the World Wide Web, advocates U.S. Congressional protection for net neutrality.
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Legislation designed to prevent  broadband Internet providers from unreasonable interference  with subscribers' access to content was introduced on Wednesday  by a senior U.S. lawmaker.
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A Democratic lawmaker on Wednesday proposed legislation to stop network providers from playing traffic cop on the Internet.
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Congressional lawmakers are taking a cue from Hollywood with an aim to beef up penalties against people who illegally swap copyrighted movies and songs over the Internet. Meanwhile, lawmakers also are targeting spyware and hackers with the threat of jail time for evil cyberspace deeds.
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In order to thwart the growth of this network, the MPAA will be pursuing BitTorrent indexing servers known as trackers. While trackers function somewhat differently than traditional indexing servers found
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HR.4077, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, has been approved by the United States&#39; House Judiciary Committee. The bill specifies up to five years&#39; jail for anyone making over a thousand copyrighted works available for download.
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Some people whine about things like BitTorrent apparently is downloading as slow as molasseses in January in Alaska, and whine about it their Kuro5hin diaries. No one is advocating downloading illegal torrents, but legal ones like Linux ISOs, Michael Crawford FLOSS format songs, etc. This story can help you make BitTorrent download faster.
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Public file sharing via BitTorrent has taken several severe blows recently. Find out where the industry will be attacking next and read the note from Suprnova.
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No one is forcing anyone to put their work into the public commons. But, once you do, you need to accept that you no longer can wholly control how it is used. The open-source software world understands this to its benefit.
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InfoWorld - The U.S. Congress still needs to deal with network neutrality, and supporters in Congress are willing to block any legislation favored by broadband providers until the issue is resolved, a leading Democratic lawmaker said Wednesday.
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The networkâs charge for access to content over the Internet has been troubling.
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com December 14, 2004, 11:46 AM PT. The Motion Picture Association of America launched a new legal campaign Tuesday targeting the BitTorrent and eDonkey file-swapping networks, two technologies widely used to trade movies online.