Comcast Wins Protest Against “Shake Down” of BitTorrent Pirates

Comcast has only recently started fighting back against this one law firm (Prenda) because they were not promptly paying Comcast's fee for handing over subscriber information.<p>Comcast charges $45 per IP address for civil cases. Prenda was late with payments in another case and the dispute even made the court docket. Comcast said to the court they discussed payment terms with Duffy (Prenda's main counsel) and resolved their differences.<p>I do not know if Prenda ever ended up paying Comcast, but Comcast's refusal to comply to me seem more rooted in the costs to their legal department than to protecting their customers.<p>Comcast had no problem giving out thousands of customer's information for two years to these black mailers until recently. The merits of the case have never changed. They sue people in favorable jurisdictions and only Comcast could have stepped forward with the contact information and fought that with real evidence.<p>Kudos to Comcast, but don't consider them for sainthood yet.

The fact that Comcast is carrying this banner almost makes me want to switch to Comcast in support. I say "almost" because I quickly remember their frequent random connection drops, slower-than-promised speeds, intentionally misleading promotional advertising, legendarily bad customer service, and ruthless nationwide campaign against affordable municipally-provided high speed Internet access.

This article doesn't mention it, but I wonder whether the fact that plaintiffs were pornography producers (<a href="http://paidcontent.org/2012/06/20/comcast-crushes-porn-owners-shakedown-of-subscribers/" rel="nofollow">http://paidcontent.org/2012/06/20/comcast-crushes-porn-owner...</a>) was relevant to the court's decision. The decision is just a one-paragraph notice saying "for reasons stated in open court...", so it's hard to know. But I could see the Court being more worried about discovery being used for harassment in such a context.<p>On the other hand, given the lack of a written opinion, it's possible the Court didn't care about this "shakedown" aspect of the argument at all, and instead quashed the subpoenas for some more technical reason, like the improper-joinder argument that the article mentions.

Even if there is no relevant legal precedent, Comcast's common sense argument that the plaintiff in the case had a clear history of not using the identities of the subscribers the court compelled ISPs to release in any litigation is the kind of argument that, in a perfect world, would become the norm. However, IANAL so I have no idea how likely it is to be successfully used again.

I guess now I know where comcast has been spending my subscription fees. Apparently on very expensive lawyers. Now if comcast would only upgrade there service so American broadband would be more comparable to Sweden or Japan.

wow, at least we know not to settle out of court. They need to prove I did the sharing first (I am not my IP address).