DailyTech - Comcast Nailed with P2P Traffic Shaping and Throttling Class Action

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Internet Comcast Nailed with P2P Traffic Shaping and Throttling Class Action
Purav Sanghani - November 15, 2007 2:36 PM

120 comment(s) - last by FoSTeX.. on Nov 18 at 3:24 AM

Comcast's recent practices of throttling P2P traffic has finally attracted a class action lawsuit from a frustrated customer

Comcast's bandwidth limitting and peer-to-peer traffic sabatoging traffic finally caught up with the company. A class-action lawsuit has been filed (PDF) by residents in the state of California against Comcast.

Jon Hart, the plaintiff, claims Comcast Corporation committed a breach of contract by violating Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing, the Business and Professions Code section 17200 and 17500 and the Consumer Legal Remedies Act by practicing the management of P2P-based traffic including throttling bandwidth and "transmitting unauthorized hidden messages to the computers of customers who utilize such applications."

The class-action includes "all persons in California who purchased the Service [Comcast broadband Internet] between November 13, 2003 and the present and used or attempted to use peer-to-peer or online file sharing applications and/or Lotus Notes."

The plaintiff represents all persons who have used P2P and file sharing applications, but there is no mention of exceptions where copyright infringement/piracy is involved.

Hart's submission seeks contract damages for compensation of the impeded service, but does not specify an amount.

Recently, many other ISPs such as Canadian-based Bell Sympatico confessed to using traffic management to restrict access to accounts based on the type of application or protocols they are using. However, Comcast is still the first company to get hit with a lawsuit for such practices.

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RE: I can't wait...

By Treckin on 11/15/2007 5:55:09 PM , Rating: 2

Its pretty clear that this is a harvested case by a high-profile lawyer.

Im sure it was confirmed, and run by many diffent possible plaintifs, that this person was using and being limited on completely legal grounds.

Look at brown v b. or ed of topika kansas.

They hunted for the perfect plaintif for almost 5 years before selecting the Brown family.

Parent

"We basically took a look at this situation and said, this is bullshit." -- Newegg Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng's take on patent troll Soverain