While there may indeed be those who are part of the Net Neutrality effort in hopes of using piracy towards their own ends, that does not negate the argument that BitTorrent does have legimate uses and the actions that Comcast took impacted the usability of BotTorrent for entirely legal purposes.
I can offer myself as a prime example of the impact Comcast's actions had - I work for a large computer manufacturer in an R&D role from my home (I live near Denver and refuse to relocate to where the lab I work out of is). In my work, I routinely use BitTorrent to transfer large multi GB files to and from my home lab/office. My network connectivity was via Comcast's high speed business internet offering. Once Comcast implemented their bit torrent blocking solution, while I could receive BitTorrent files withgout problem, I could not transmit them (even though I was going via a private tracker my employer runs for this purpose) until I resorted to using IPSEC on my connection to the lab.
You seem to be equating the technology with the uses of it - any technology can be used for legimate or illegimate purposes.
Regards . . . John Haverland
----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Bennett <richard@bennett.com>
To: Edward Almasy <ealmasy@scout.wisc.edu>
Cc: Kevin McArthur <kevin@stormtide.ca>; nnsquad@nnsquad.org; Nick Weaver <nweaver@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 10:24:59 AM
Subject: [ NNSquad ] Re: Speculation, how AT&T can implement "copyright filtering" without wiretapping/dpi...
As I understand it, this list was formed in reaction to Comcast being
caught red-handed ... engaging in responsible network management. If
it's meant to be a piracy rights forum, I was mislead.
It's important, I think, for us to distinguish legitimate and
illegitimate forms of traffic control, as well as to identify the
innocent victims of over-zealous enforcement of copyrights and all that.
Large-scale piracy is a problem that cries out
for a technical solution.
The problem is too blatant to ignore and we all bear the costs of it. If
half of residential broadband's capacity is devoted to stolen material,
cleaning up these networks makes more available to the rest of us at
lower cost. It can only help, as long as it's done right.
The EFF argued with me at NN2008 that pirates would resort to crypto and
all that to avoid detection, but that bird doesn't fly. In order to
collude with someone you don't know to pirate MS Office, you need a
rendezvous system of some kind, If that system is heavily cloaked to
avoid detection it will be ineffective. The movement of piracy toward
cloaked systems actually serves the aims of the content owners even
better than immediate blocking or post-hoc prosecution. They want this
sort of thing not to happen at all, naturally, but are willing to accept
that a certain amount is unavoidable.
The level
of piracy we have today with Mininova, The Pirate's Bay and
their kin is so blatant we can't really expect the content owners to do
nothing about it.
RB
Edward Almasy wrote:
> On Jan 28, 2008, at 4:32 AM, Richard Bennett wrote:
>> There is a risk of unfair shut-offs, but it's very, very small and
>> can be dealt with after the fact in some reasonable way.
>
> I would suggest that the very existence of NNSquad belies this
> argument. It's likely that few if any on this list are spammers,
> however most here have been directly affected in one fashion or
> another by anti-spammer measures, and I would suspect many of us are
> here in part because of the prospect of similar unfair measures being
> introduced.
>
> Ed
>
>
>