Californian Jon Hart has filed a lawsuit against Comcast arguing that its throttling of BitTorrent violates federal computer fraud laws, user contracts and anti-fraudulent advertising statutes.
According to Wired, Hart argues that Comcast’s “Download at Crazy Fast Speeds” promise is false and misleading as Comcast interferes with BitTorrent downloads, delivering in some cases no downloads at all. Hart is seeking to certify the suit as a class action and wants Comcast to pay damages to himself and all other California based Comcast subscribers.
Comcast has consistently denied that it is blocking BitTorrent traffic, despite numerous independent tests proving that this is the case.
Wired has a copy of the suit here (pdf)
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British Telecom (BT) in the UK does this too, though they deny it. BitTorrent speeds suck during the day, then at exactly 1am, they pick up until I don’t know when.
Jon Hart++
Comcast Policy–
Fair enough
Blazing fast video search
http://www.meetingflex.com/SearchVideo.aspx
I hope they lose. I’m sure Comcast would just love to have all of us PAY $70/mo or more for their “10 Mbps” HIGH SPEED broadband then only use it to load 12KB Google pages and a 1.5 MB email attachment here and there, but unfortunately for those cons that’s not what people use internet for anymore. People have a right to EVERY PACKET they pay for. This guy’s gonna win because the Judges and jurors themselves are customers and KNOW what’s it’s like to be SCREWED OVER by cable, phone, and satellite companies.
1) Fraud, 2) deceptive advertising, and 3theft — what less should we expect from the company which took over scandal-riddled Adelphia? (yes, THEFT — when Comcast takes your bandwith without your permission, and then turns and re-sells it to other customers — they are STEALING from you! That was YOUR bandwidth! you BOUGHT and PAID FOR it! They are stealing your property!)
FAIR!!!!!!!!!!!!
How do I join the class? I normally avoid all the BS class action lawsuits, but I’m in on this one.
Excellent! It’s bad enough they charge an absurd amount of money for their service. Playing the internet bouncer for their overpriced club is just ridiculous. I’m glad they were caught and I hope this goes class action. Its time for greedy, evil corporations to pay for their mistakes…
encrypt your connection, and it blazes at 500k … don’t encrypt on the same exact torrent and its 3k.. thats the smoking gun
Oh good… my connection is going to slow down by 50% so all you guys can download a crappy bootleg of BeoWulf from BitTorrent.
Yippee
Hmmmm, What are you downloading Steve?
Yeah Steve … What do you download? Greedy SOB probably hoping Comcast wins so he can keep downloading from other sources. Nice try!
Yeah, where do I sign?
I use BitTorrent as its the easiest means to share my family videos who are all over the world, they join our private Bit Torrent server and download our personal clips of when Sue’s kid is calling mommy “dada” and is being pulled by her family dog in Hong Kong. I’m about ready to drop Comcast too.
I hope Hart puts Comcast out of business ! Good luck !
interestingly enough, comcast has already been accused of throttling on a/v input devices (web conferencing) and if you do a quick search for iChat/Comcast problems you’ll find threads going back over 2 years on this kind of issue…