Counterproductive?
Nov 15th, 2007 at 9:19 am by Susie
I don’t know that I’d want to be drawing this much attention to myself for what is, after all, alleged to be an illegal practice but I suppose he has his reasons:
SAN JOSE, Calif. - A San Francisco Bay area subscriber to Comcast Corp.’s high-speed Internet service has sued the company, alleging it engages in unfair business practices by interfering with subscribers’ file sharing.
Subscriber Jon Hart based his claims on the results of an investigation by the Associated Press published last month that showed Philadelphia-based Comcast actively interferes with attempts by some high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online.
Hart’s lead lawyer, Mark N. Todzo of San Francisco, said his client suspected before reading the AP report that Comcast was interfering with his Internet traffic.
“What the AP report did was just confirm to him that it wasn’t just him who was suffering from the problem,” Todzo said. “There was this confluence of events where everyone seemed to reach the same conclusion, which was that Comcast was engaging in this activity.”
There are plenty of legal reasons to use file sharing programs. Just for one, it’s the fastest way to download CDs of various versions of Linux.
File sharing is used in some academic circles as well for datasets and documents. It is only illegal if you share copywrited material without paying to do so. While this is the most widely know use it is hardly the only one.