It’s been well known for a while that many ISPs around the world have been messing with the flow of BitTorrent traffic in an effort to counter piracy.

It’s also been well known that amongst those ISPs, one of the worst culprits for blocking file sharing traffic is Comcast, one of the largest Internet Service Providers in the US.

However, until now, exact data as to how and when this was being done has been unavailable, and Comcast itself told the FCC in February that it was only done during periods of heavy network traffic.

A new Measuring Tool

Now, thanks to a tool developed by the Max Planck Institute, that data is now available, and the first statistics to be released show that Comcast actually blocks BitTorrent traffic 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

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I didn’t see this one coming at all, in fact I thought Demonoid was dead and buried. But no, six months to the day after it disappeared, the Demonoid BitTorrent tracker and site is back.

The trouble for the popular BitTorrent tracker began last June when a Dutch anti-piracy outfit put pressure on the site’s ISP. This lead to it being moved from Holland to Canada, presumed to be a safe haven.

Unfortunately for Demonoid, the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) got the site pulled by its ISP. After attempting to get past the problem by just blocking all incoming traffic from Canada, the site finally went offline, supposedly for good on November 9th.

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A recent post on the Last100 blog (part of the Read/Write Web network) written by Guinevere Orvis, an interactive producer with the CBC, talks about how the Canadian television network has chosen to distribute one of its shows using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. 

The idea apparently started after she read about the Norwegian state broadcaster doing the same thing with a travel show.

It’s nice to know that our national broadcaster is open to new ideas, and from the sounds of Norway’s experience, it should be one that they consider repeating. 

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The Internet hasn’t been good for the movie or music industry, at least in terms of providing a new way for the distribution of content which takes away the need for traditional companies.

But does that excuse the movie industry starting to spy on what we do with our Internet connections, and share with others across our network?

Here, Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge looks at the issues surrounding a speech given by Dan Glickman, the chairman of the MPAA:

Glickman’s Spying Is No Game

Hollywood for years has had a fascination with spies. Some are action spies, like the various incarnations of Bond, James Bond, or cerebral spies like Alec Guinness’ masterfully subtle George Smiley. 

All sorts of people have played TV spies, from Robert Culp and Bill Cosby to Patrick McGoohan, Robert Goulet and the fabulous Lady Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.

There have been spies who watch and listen to us without our knowledge. Gene Hackman had a creepy turn as the telephone eavesdropper (technically not a spy, although he spied) in “The Conversation” in 1974. 

Ten years ago Will Smith’s “Enemy of the State” played off of the then-paranoid “fantasy”, now a reality, of the all-hearing National Security Agency (NSA). The current crop of Bourne films shows a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the technical capability to listen and see anything and anyone at any time.

It wouldn’t be an issue if Hollywood’s fascination with monitoring our words and images was confined to fiction. But over the past couple of months, the fourth wall has been broken and Hollywood is now setting itself up to play a new spy game for real. 

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When it comes to the subject of peer to peer and file sharing over the Internet, there seems to be a push of late to tighten up the measures so that even innocent people are going to find themselves mixed up too.

With the French ‘three strikes and you’re out’ measures, and the recently mooted effort in the UK to force ISPs to ban file sharers from the Internet, the authorities are cracking down hard.

Here, Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge discussed the issue, as well as efforts to tenuously link P2P file sharing with identity theft.

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NRK recently took part in a very successful experiment with distributing the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation programme, Nordkalotten 365, via BitTorrent.

A little while afterwards, I was interviewed by the German news web site www.tagesschau.de about the process, and how this could affect distribution of similar programmes in the future.

Although the article is in German, my original conversation with Mr. Wulf Rohwedder is in English. It reveals some of my thoughts about this project so I decided to share it:

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The fight against file sharers, and so called music and movie pirates continues, even though the organisations fighting it must know that they’re fighting a battle which was lost as soon as it began.

Regardless, Instead of working with the technologies and companies involved, organisations such as the RIAA and MPAA, along with the US government seem intent on going down this never ending road of criminalising otherwise law abiding citizens.

One of the biggest groups of people to be targeted is that of college and university students, and here, Art Brodsky outlines the latest legal move on this front.

Higher Ed Bill Passes House With File-Sharing Warning

The House yesterday passed a higher-education bill (HR 4137) that included language requiring colleges and universities to deal with what Hollywood sees as a problem in digital downloads.

The bill, which passed 354-58, said the colleges and universities “shall”, which means there isn’t much room for discussion, “develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity” and report on their policies.

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