“nevermind, the Fourth Estate will set you free!”

In a test run with endpoints in San Francisco and Philadelphia, the Associated Press got into checking the claims of Comcast, as a rule, blocking BitTorrent transfers.

Using the King James Bible as the transferred data, the transfer was repeatedly blocked. This same test was repeated with other Internet Service Providers, and no problems were found, unless the sender was using Comcast as the ISP.  In case you wonder, the King James Bible is in the public domain, and there is no governing body on Earth that would, or should, restrict its transmission. Just to make sure the problem was not with the Bible transmission, several other non-copyrighted works were tried, with the same results. When the sending computer was tied to Comcast as ISP, the transmission was blocked.

from the complete article on BetaNews

Analysis of the transfers revealed that the failures were due to “reset” packets which each carried the return address of the other computer, but were not actually sent by either.

There is equipment designed to decrease bandwidth consumption that would cause this to happen, but Comcast has not confirmed if it is using any such hardware. Of course, Comcast has every right to decide how it manages content being sent across its network, but some users have complained that legitimate transfers are being negatively affected in the process.

 

In the same pages, several comments were made by users indicating that they were Comcast subscribers, but had no troubles. Since anecdotal evidence from comments tends to be suspect, I would tend to believe that Comcast is indeed actively blocking BitTorrent transfers.

Is Comcast trying to avoid legal entanglements, both for itself and its customers? Is some hypersensitive do-gooder at Comcast appointing himself the arbiter of acceptable use?

Your take? Any Comcast users originating BitTorrents that are successful?

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[tags] BitTorrent, file transfers, copyrighted materials, Comcast, King James Bible, public domain, FUD, fear of prosecution [/tags]