Thursday, March 26, 2009

Getting official statement from Comcast

I'm so excited. I've made contact with "ComcastBonnie", one of Comcast's official representatives on Twitter.

In a few minutes she's going to be giving us an official statement of Comcast's position vis-a-vis RIAA.



Keywords: lawyer digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property portable music player

6 comments:

Alter_Fritz said...

Ray wrote:
"I'm so excited. I've made contact with [...] one of Comcast's official representatives[...]"

Wow, you get excited just because you actually got someone from customer care "on the line"?
Must be a bad company then if it is so hard to archive that... or you are just the extra emotional guy that gets excited for minor incidents?!
*just kidding of course*

But seriously, why took it comcast nearly 3 month for this "denial"?
Could it have to do with the confidentiality thingy that RIAA claimed was in place in those negotiations/talks with ISPs they claimed to have?
Could it be that comcast is NOW simply fearing the public backslash given how the public around the world is reacting to this overreaching demands of Organised Music?

Because lets not forget, it was the same comcast here that was caught interfering (and afterwards "lying" about it) with your comunications. They spoofed IP addresses and send messages to your partner to terminate the connection with you when you wanted to share the bible with friends and relatives for example.

For those non techies out there: picture a telefon call where a allegedly nice looking comcast person muted your call between you and your mother and then telling to your mother in your voice that you want to quit the call and vice versa.
And in doing so effectively making it impossible for you two to talk to each other.

I remain skeptical about the motives and the "truth probability" of this comcast announcement/statement.
(In a picture by the way, and we all know that digital pictures indeed do lie easily and with difficulties to spot that the picture is fake)

raybeckerman said...

No what was exciting was the 'social networking' aspect. I made the contact just by checking my Twitter stream.

Alter_Fritz said...

Oh, the Social networking thingy... I see!
:-/

Twitter is just another hip and cool thing of the moment IMO.

Look out for a newsreport by (canadian) CBC titled
"'A computer network called internet'
Broadcast Date: Oct. 8, 1993". (*)

Really OLD(!) and funny stuff explaining "the internet" and showing this old thingy called IRC (internet relay chat).

The granddaddy of twitter if you will :-)


(*) http://archives.cbc.ca/science_technology/computers/dossier/1738/

Alter_Fritz said...

correction:
sorry, it wasn't about IRC but about usenet in that clip. Had it wrong in memory.
My fault.

Alter_Fritz said...

"I made the contact just by checking my Twitter stream."

And the world can read how you "made contact". Isn't THAT amazing? ;-)

following people on twitter, the new sport for stalkers? *a seriously concerned A_F* (lets hope twitter at least logs all search queries and works with law enforcement agencies)

http://search.twitter.com/search?&from=RayBeckerman&to=ComcastBonnie

Anonymous said...

Declaring they follow the DMCA without explaining how they do it is not much of a declaration. There is a lot of leeway as to how an ISP responds to a take down request because they have to make a good faith determinion as to whether content is infringing or not.

The DMCA is "one strike and you are out for at least 10 days". You are responsible for convincing the Service Provider that you are not infringing to regain your service.
As a non-infringing user of an ISP, the DMCA gives me very little protection. The DMCA protests an ISP from its subscribers and the complainers as long as it acts in good faith.
The best I can do is recover my expenses from the original complainer. To do that I have to prove that they intentionally made a misrepresentation.
While USC 17 512 (c) (3) (A) i, v, and vi require the original complainer to fully disclose their identity, 512 (c) (3) (B) (ii) requires the ISP to act without it and makes the ISP responsible for requesting it (but only if they want to ???).

It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that a non-infringing user has NO protection.

just a biased observer