I'm being forced to switch from Qwest DSL to Comcast cable-modem because the new address into which I'm moving doesn't have DSL available.

Until now, I've been only peripherally paying attention to the news reports that Comcast was clamping down on Torrent customers. Now suddenly I wish I'd been actually paying attention.

I'm not much of a Torrent guy, but I'm moving in with someone who *is*, and I want to know what's going to happen to us when we put him on the line. Are we going to get cut off, or turned over to the feds, or what?

Another wrinkle in this equation is that I still want to depend on him keeping his nice high-ratio accounts to grab the occasional TV show for the household... Comcast doesn't give me Top Gear at my current tier of subscription, and I can't afford to go up to the next tier. And I think I'd die if I missed a Doctor Who.

So what's my outlook? Anyone know?

Comcast currently has a monthly 250GB cap, and this includes upstream. Blow it once, and you are warned. Go over again, and they cut you off.

I'm not sure what they do when they receive MPAA or RIAA nastygrams.

This is good information, thanks.

It seems they tweaked that 250GB number to weed out the warez kiddies while leaving most other folks untouched.

I supposed you could hit it if you streamed netflix constantly, but I'm not planning to do that.

Wow, Tom. I knew of the 250GB cap, but I didn't know that included upstream. That's going to be tough for your roommate, Tony, since in order to keep that nice ratio of his, he'll be using more upstream than down.

On the whole, though, I agree with many that 250GB is actually pretty reasonable. However, I think it's only reasonable right now. In the future, I see a lot more content becoming IP based, and I think the ISPs are really preparing to price gouge us when that happens. Between VOIP, AppleTV, Netflix's expanding library, XBox's online marketplace, and services like OnLive, I can definitely see that limit being reached, and reached legally.

Thank goodness you don't have Time Warner Cable, Tony.

Do you not have FIOS in your area? I can testify that it rocks.

Area, maybe. That neighborhood, no.

That really confuses me, too, because that neighborhood is an established neighborhood within city limits. I don't have any idea why it's all dial-up out there.

In fact, my old address and the new address are essentially along the same basic main thoroughfare running northward from downtown. And the new address is closer to downtown than the old address. Old address is slightly to the East of SR99 at 130th street, new address is slightly to the West of SR99 at 112th street. I genuinely expected to have DSL or fiber at higher speeds than what I was already getting. I'm flabbergasted.

I hope I never have to deal with any of that kind of crap. Mediacom doesn't have a cap yet and they have been good about raising speeds while keeping the price the same. I don't really download much of anything but the caps seem unfair. Isn't digital cable using bandwith too are they going to charge by the hour for tv next. I would guess the caps are more to keep people from dumping cable tv and streaming from hulu or netflix.

I'm not big into using torrent's. Is there any legitimate and legal purpose they serve?

If not I would say the establishment, in what ever form, will slowly tighten and we shouldn't be surprised when it happens.

And if I were running an SP, and I had users busting 250Gb a month I'd kick them off too. I know how much it would be hurting my bottom line to have too many users like that on my network.

Just like death and taxes, the only other thing in life that is certain is that pirates will always come up with new ways of distribution.

Cheers

Cris.

I have seen legitimate uses for Torrents, yes. I would agree that they are mostly used to share very large illegal files, but I've seen them used to share large *legal* files as well.

I have a couple of specific legal examples I've seen Torrents used for.

1. I've seen torrents used for distributing legal ISO images of open-source software and operating systems such as Linux distributions.

2. I've personally retrieved a torrent of a VMWare machine image of a linux distro that ran multiple different browsers, for the purpose of testing your web site on a bunch of old browsers for compatibility.

3. Vixy puts some MP3 recordings of her songs up on her web site for anyone to download. When one of her songs got suddenly popular due to being posted on a widely-read Browncoat message board, her home-hosted web server (well, its DSL connection) got brought to its knees. In order to allow the song files to continue to be downloaded, they converted them to torrents to spread the load among everybody who was doing the downloading (really the main purpose of a torrent in the first place).

I admit that my desired use for torrents would be to grab TV show episodes that I shouldn't be able to grab (new episodes of Doctor Who and Top Gear that I can't get any other way because I don't live in the UK). But that's still a bit different than warez and DVD rips.

TWC, at least in my area, has "Business Class" service. (I have the "Teleworker" service.) It's significantly more expensive, but you get a static IP, quick and non-idiotic tech support, and no ridiculous usage limits. (I'm sure they have a no-spam provision and so forth.)

I don't like TWC at all, but I've had basically zero problems with TWCBC. Occasionally I even realize my speeds have been upgraded without any cost increase.

Yes, Comcast offers business class service as well. If I could get confirmation that they don't put bandwidth caps on their business class service, it might be worth investigating.

When I signed up for this service years ago, I had to call and speak to a salesperson on the phone. She was very friendly and knowledgeable about the plans, and what she didn't know she found out for me. Comcast may be different, but I wouldn't be surprised if they also had professional inside sales people who will get you that information.

Ummmm, please explain why stealing from the UK tax payer is any different from stealing from a software manufacturer or movie studio. Are there a different set of laws for this content?

It is not free for me in the UK to watch Top Gear or Dr Who, I am legally bound to pay a TV licence. I have no option but to pay this if I own a TV set, even if I don't watch the BBC and just watch DVDs I still have to pay the licence. It's not a subscription it's a form of tax on me. The BBC sells it's content worldwide to further off set the production cost so I get a better quality program to watch, so if it's legally available in your country on subscription I don't see why you apply a different set of rules to it.

People are regularly prosecuted and sometimes even jailed in the UK for not paying their TV licence, the same punishment can't be said for people downloading Top Gear on Torrent. Fair ???

Don't get me wrong everyone does it, just interested in your rational.

Cheers

Cris.

Edit - BTW good points on the legal use of Torrents, I guess sharing large files still is a pain in the ass on the internet.

There's also everyone's favorite instant music collection from the good folks of SXSW.

On the topic of UK television licenses...

What if I had a large screen hooked only to my media computer? Is it then still a 'television'?

Not yet, but they're working on it...

At the moment anything mains powered with a TV tuner in it is classed as a TV, and legally requires a license for the premises in which it is used, although there are some caveats to this I can't be bothered to look up at this time of night

The BBC was bitching about more and more people using the net to stream TV to a computer, and there has been a lot of mumbling about requiring a computer license to make up the costs lost to TV licensing.

pca

If you don't have a license, they just automatically assume you're avoiding paying for a TV that you must obviously have somewhere and so they constantly send you scary letters.

Also when you buy a TV, they're supposed to note down your details and forward it onto the TV licensing agency.

There was some exception where if the TV was portable and solely battery powered then it'd count under your main residences license or something like that...

Much like any file transfer protocol, there are plenty of legitimate and illegitimate activities using torrents. Outside the uses already discussed, I've heard of a major university in the EU using torrents to speed up patch distribution across their large network. Instead of 20 dedicated servers, they reduced it to 2, and used a small bit of disk space on every client to push updates at night. Blizzard also uses torrents for the distribution of World of Warcraft, as well as their classic games downloaded from their store. Torrenting for them allows the load balancing to happen automatically to all their various CDN systems.

And Tony, Top Gear is now on the iTunes store. Season 13 isn't there yet, but I hope they do start putting the shows up soon after the UK air date. It's something I'd gladly pay for via the iTunes season pass.

With respect to being an American downloading Top Gear via BitTorrent (which I am), I offer the following rationale.

I do pay for my cable TV service which includes BBC America, which does air Top Gear. Right now, they're airing a mix of seasons 10-12. There is no announcement as to the availability of season 13. As such, I *am* paying for a legal BBC service that does include the show in question. It's just not the current season. Furthermore, we don't get BBC America in HD. The torrent feed is higher quality than what I can get from my Comcast feed.

I will also state, for the record, that if there was a legal way that I could *pay* for Top Gear Season 13, I'd do it, but no such mechanism exists. Not even the iTunes Store has it (they only go up to the end of Season 12).

If you bought 2 copies of season 12 off iTunes, would you be justified in downloading season 13 from elsewhere?

Top Gear isn't shot in HD, with the exception of one of their specials a season or two back. Though I'm sure the quality difference is easy to achieve, as I doubt BBCA is on the high priority list for low compression on most networks.

Really? It's definitely shot/broadcast in a widescreen format. Dunno the bitrate, but it looks HD to me.

Top Gear, as broadcast on BBC America via Comcast Houston, is letterboxed and over-compressed, so the effective resolution is quite poor. What I get through the torrent feeds is much, much better (e.g., 624x352 pixels on the season 13, episode 1 torrent).

It is widescreen and has been for a while, but only the polar special was shot in HD. Though I can't find any confirmation either way about series 13, as it was believed it would start soon in HD. The budget cuts may have pushed it off a but longer.

This is the problem with the current television system. With the world being so connected we hear about shows in other countries so we want to see them. The makers of the shows are still operating in pre-internet mode like we don't know about the shows so they can just take their time getting them to the rest of the world. Well we know about the content and can get it just not from them. So we are supposed to just sit with the chocolate cake a foot away and not take a bite.

Speaking specifically about the BBC I don't see why they can't let residents of other countries subscribe to their on demand website. Wouldn't bringing more money into the country be a good thing ? If they can get enough money from other countries they could charge residents less maybe.

I am not ambitious enough to bother downloading any television shows or movies I would rather just watch what Tivo recorded but I can see where some people that do are coming from.

Licensing issues basically. The BBC sell the programs abroad and the other broadcasters wouldn't be too thrilled if people could just go to BBC iPlayer and bypass them.

Well, it's currently a free service for Britons. (I guess they assume you all pay your TV license.) They probably don't have a good way to charge people.

Relatedly, can non-Americans watch videos on American network web sites, like, for example, ABC's Better Off Ted or CBS's Harper's Island or NBC's 30 Rock or Fox's Fringe, or even stuff on Hulu, like, let's say, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia?

I agree, I can't defend pirates, regardless of my personal internet habits.

But as I was saying, I think it's only a matter of time until it's a trivial matter to knock out 250GB of data a month. Especially if, like in Tony's situation, there's more than one heavy users in the house.


Oh heck yeah. The ISPs are scared to death. They don't want to become utilities. They make more money on selling you added features (like TV programming packages) than they would if they were solely proprietors of bits.

Your rationale is more or less the same as mine, with a few subtle differences. And also one other thing: Our desire is to simply watch the show rather than to redistribute it.

I know that neither one of us is in the right. It's just the way we try to rationalize it.

No we can't.

No, but that is not a valid comparision. A valid comparison would be if he intended to pay for season 13 when it arrived on iTunes, downloaded it elsewhere and then did subsequently pay for it on iTunes.

That is the moral equivalent of subscribing to BBCA while season 12 is being broadcast, downloading season 13 and then continuing to subscribe through when season 13 is finally shown. Excluding the issue of advert revenue at least, but then sane people skip the ads on broadcast TV anyway...

I download loads of shows that I also "pay" for through my Sky subscription and licence fee. I realise that legally I don't have a leg to stand on, but I am perfectly happy with my moral position on it. I'm not doing Sky or the BBC out of any money and I'm not doing anyone out of any DVD sales (I watch the shows and then delete them, if I want to keep any long term then I go and buy the DVD when it is out).

The part where my moral story breaks down a bit is that I wouldn't dream of downloading a film, even though I guess I could use the same justification as with the TV shows (in that just about every film gets shown on TV at some point).

Interesting, I wonder if I were in court charged with downloading the latest U2 album if this rational would stand up?

I don't pretend to know the licensing agreements that BBCA have with the BBC, but if they are not showing the latest season I would guess it isn't in their agreement yet. Would it be ok for me to download a US movie that isn't released here in the UK as long as I promised I wouldn't let anyone else have a copy? (which I imagine is almost impossible to do on Torrent?)

I am playing devils advocate a little here I know but piracy is a crime, and going back to your original point about SP's, they will eventually have their hand forced into doing something about it which will effect the minority of legitimate users.

I guess it ticks me off a little but more than usual is that the BBC in general is a great source of national pride here in the UK. We all own it, we don't have a choice in that, and I suppose the way I think about it is that you steal from them you are really stealing from me. However you could steal as much ITV content as you want

The latest series of Top Gear doesn't seem to be in HD, I couldn't watch on BBC HD on Sunday. It is widescreen of course but still no HD Strange really as more and more BBC content was being shot in HD. I was also hoping there may have been a small portion of the F1 broadcast in HD, like the build up or a special, but nothing. I would assume the budget has been pulled back in.

Cheers

Cris.

No, as previously stated it's most defiantly not free, the current cost for one house hold is £142.50. And they have a great way of collecting that, it's called the law. They assume that every house in the UK has a TV of some form and if you don't register a TV licence they will start sending you letters and eventually the threat is followed through with a man knocking on your door. They used "TV Detector Vans" at one point but I think it was largely accepted that was just a scare tactic, now they use the power of the government database. As stupid as it sounds they have a very low tolerance for people not paying and people do go to jail if they refuse to pay and the fines can be quite substantial too.

Cheers

Cris.

The same applies for TV tuner cards -- I bought a Hauppage card from somewhere on Tottenham Court Road, and they took down my address details and forwarded them to the agency.

No you don't.

Link

Nor do you need one to watch iPlayer programming after the show was originally broadcast (see link at the bottom of that page).

So if you wanted to watch Top Gear or Dr. Who in the same way that Tony does so (i.e. after it has been broadcast, even if only by an hour or two) you could do so legally for 'free' (i.e. without needing a TV license)

I meant the iPlayer stuff. I guess you could look at that as being part of the TV license, but if you actually had no TV in your house and legitimately didn't pay the TV license, you could still get to iPlayer for free.

Good point, but I think they are looking to change that in some way. Some kind of broadband tax that would cover things like iPlayer.

You do still have to pay the licence if you own a TV but don't even have it tuned in and just watch DVDs, the fact the equipment is capable of picking up a live broadcast is enough.

I'm not complaining about the licence system, I think it's a good thing. And that is proved by people living in a country where some of the most popular programs ever made come from still want to watch BBC content. My point was that even though some people's perception that we get it for free so they should be able to get it for free doesn't make it any more or less of a crime when you illegally download it on a torrent.

Cheers

Cris.

That TV Licensing FAQ snoopstah linked, which appears to be official, specifically says that you're wrong:

Films give me qualms too: if the entire music industry were wound up tomorrow, which is effectively what would happen if copyright were made inapplicable to digital data, then there would still be music (indeed, music would arguably be better off) -- but if the entire film industry were wound up, then there wouldn't still be films.

Peter

In theory, yes. But I think that in practice the onus is often on you to prove that you never use the built-in tuner. Which is, philosophically speaking, a difficult thing to prove. Though people have. This issue used to be a fertile source of pedantry flamewars on that fertile ground for pedantry flamewars, the Cambridge newsgroup cam.misc.

Peter

s/download/upload/

The main exemption is that you can use as many TV receviers as you like, as long as they aren't used for receiving broadcast TV (specifically currently broadcasting TV).

So you can install a TV (but don't tune it!), hook it up a PC and watch timeshifted shows on iPlayer, but not the live feeds. edit: Ok, this was posted earlier.

The onus is on them to prove you are using it to watch broadcast TV. If you have a tuned TV on the premises and they somehow got a search warrant (they need evidence of use for this), then it could be tricky, but if the TV was untuned they wouldn't get a conviction without other evidence.

Hmmm interesting, this has changed my understanding. It certainly never used to be as clear cut as that.

Still doesn't make downloading content illegally ok, even here in the UK the licence issued to you on iPlayer only lasts 30 days a torrent divx file for example is outside any legal licence so is just as bad as any other pirate goods.

Cheers

Cris.

I remember somebody going to great efforts to actually remove the tuner in his TV because he only ever watched foreign satellite TV so didn't want or need to watch regular broadcasts. I think in the end he won but it involved an incredible amount of hassle and effort...

I guess they've changed their policy since then.

And if you had bought it online from an overseas retailer...?

Yes, there would be. Unless you meant "there wouldn't be $120-million dollar, craptacularly story-less, blockbuster VFX circle-jerks." Much like there is an indie music scene, there is also very much an indy film scene.

Yes, but most of it is crap made by just the same kind of self-indulgent tw*ts who just haven't got their big break yet.

Right, I'd not mourn those. (And one thing about VFX-fest films is that if they're worth seeing at all, they're worth seeing in a real cinema with big screen and sound system. So there is a revenue stream available there.) But according to IMDB, even "Brokeback Mountain", most of which was two dudes sitting round a campfire not even saying all that much, cost $44 million to make. Clearly some of that went on overpricing by suppliers (and actors?) who knew their customers were loaded -- overpricing, in other words, which would soon vanish if film-makers lost their cosy monopoly on digital copying of their work. But it still seems that making films which don't suck is still really quite expensive compared to making music which doesn't suck.

I'm very glad that "The Fellowship of the Ring" ($93M) and "Lawrence of Arabia" ($15M in 1962 dollars) were made, and were made the way they were.

Peter

I don't see how it's any different to Football (eugh!) where blokes who would most likely be binmen, carpet fitters or insurance salesmen in another life can be paid £100k a week to chase after a ball. These industries are all self perpetuating with salaries that increase year on year like Moore's law.

With regards to technology and equipment, costs really can get out of hand very quickly. Film stock alone can be ludicrously expensive, add to that the hire cost of decent cameras, lighting and grip equipment.

Also, the film and TV industry in the US is massively unionised which means they really do pay people large sums of money to just sit on their asses all day doing nothing.

So, Unions are indirectly responsible for film piracy. They should cover that in one of their next public service announcements.

Er, no. I'm simply saying that the unionised labour in that industry has resulted in the increase of salaries and numbers of people involved which, in turn, results in the increase in overall cost of a production.

I'm all for unions when they help support members being treated unfairly by their employers, but when they start engaging in Spanish practices, that's when I have a problem.

Well, that's one difference from football, then: at least more money does buy you more gear (and even "Brokeback Mountain" probably had vapour-trails and so on removed in post-production) and thus, in theory, a better end-product -- though diminishing returns can of course set in. Whereas with football, as long as you're paying Eric Cantona or Jimmy Greenhoff or whoever the current superstars are, enough that they can give up their day-job and be full-time footballers, presumably extra money on top of that doesn't really cause them to produce better-quality football. (And how come, given that TV plays such a massive part in popularising the sport and lionising its stars, it's the TV people paying the clubs in order to televise their matches, and not the other way round?)

Peter

The problem is that most unions are crooked and all unions abuse their bargaining power. At least in North America.

Anyway, it doesn't seem like cinema piracy has put a dent in movie profits at all.

My personal experience of unions in the US (particularly in New York) is exactly that. The companies I dealt with did the majority of their work in New Jersey and left installation in Manhattan until the absolute last moment.

I don't know how it works over there, but over here, sports programing generates tons of ad revenue for the TV people, so it's well worth it for them to pay the leagues for the rights to televise the games.

Update:

Comcast says their limit is 250 gigabytes per month, bidirectional, as we had already discussed.

What surprises me is that there's no way for a customer to monitor their household bandwidth usage. (I asked.) Clearly Comcast can track a given client's bandwidth usage (they have to in order to enforce the cap), but keep that information secret from the users until they bust the threshold. How terribly unfair.

I suppose could put a dedicated proxy computer between my network and the cable modem, and track usage that way. But I don't have the extra computer and don't want to do that anyway.

I like being able to stream instant Netflix on my Xbox or my Tivo. I wonder how many of those I could watch in a month before hitting 250gb.

Here are some interesting numbers:

Assuming a 10Mbps link, you could theoretically download just over 3TB per month at full speed, 24 hours a day. That means that Comcast is limiting you to one-twelfth of what you assumed you could get.

You've gotta figure a Netflix download is probably about 2GB. A DVD would be about 4GB, the quality is somewhat lower, and the compression is probably a little better. (I would guess H.264 vs. a DVD's MPEG-2.) So give it some overhead and call it 100 movies. That's still more than three a day, so it's probably not a significant barrier, unless you have a digital hoarding complex.

Still, it sucks for them to change the rules on you.

Yup, about 2-3gb per Netflix movie is confirmed from some searches I did.

So for my purposes (mostly video games and netflix streaming), 250gb per month is generous enough. As long as I don't host torrents, I should be OK.

And they didn't really change the rules on *me*, they started doing it before I signed up, so I went in knowing what the situation was. What I don't like is the inability to monitor the overall household usage unless I install a routing server in front of the cable modem.

How much would a HD netflix rental set you back? What exactly happens when you hit the cap after the warning? They shut you down and you just get one last final bill?

What if I were to exceed "the cap" by using their "On Demand" system to watch HD (free movies and other free content) rentals over and over via the cable box they provide?

The cable modem doesn't have a small admin/configuration web portal that tells you this?

You should demand read-only SNMP access to the CPE.

That's what I was hoping for. The Comcast support people did not offer me that kind of option. It's possible that such an option exists, but I don't know how to reach it.

The Comcast support people just said I should install McAfee Suite and use its bandwidth monitor utility (ignoring the fact that it would only work for one computer).

I missed this one comment originally. In many European cities (or even whole countries), Football clubs don't need TV at all for popularity. They were filling stadiums long before TVs were widespread in those countries. The same argument is valid for popular sports and teams in the US and Canada.

Nmap is your friend.

Ah. Verizon FiOS routers just operate a web server on standard port 80. It's as simple as pointing a web browser at the ip address of the router.

Except their routers are awful. Too high a failure rate, and for some reason they route their guide data and VOD through it, so when I took it out of my setup, the one FIOS box I have no longer gets any guide data (my main TV uses cablecards, which don't get VOD anyway).

I've dealt with a couple ISPs who give you routers/modems with little to no options in their admin screens. It's really annoying. I've even seen one that a) only used WEP, and b) did not allow you to change the router's login info. Incredible.

ISTR getting a modem/router for a BT business line a few years ago that didn't have any user acessible management options. The engineer came along and installed it, gave us the list of IP addresses, tested one PC and then buggered off.

The Efficient Networks 5861, actually had quite a nice CLI once you hacked into it after the engineer left. I still have a couple of them sat in a box in the loft

Yes, that was the one. Never needed to do anything with it though. All the IP addresses were public so there were no firewalls (other than the ones on the machines) or port forwarding to set up.

That would be good if it wasn't for the fact that quite a few home routers have a screwed up SNMP implementation.

If you queried the transfer counters on older Speedtouch routers, you'd get a weird value back. It would increment if you downloaded/uploaded but the actual value it increased by would have little to no relation to the amount you actually transferred. I worked around it by basically scraping the data out of the telnet CLI.

I've had similar issues with Netgear routers as well but they were usually unreliable in other ways as well which meant them getting binned.

All of this effort is to get line stats into MRTG.