Comcast Takes Heat For Years Old Copyright Injection Warnings Comcast is once again under fire, this time for injecting copyright violation warnings into user traffic streams. While many years old now, the practice has oddly seen renewed criticism after a developer posted one such warning to GitHub, which in turn gained the attention of ZDNet. The message, part of the Center for Copyright Information's (read: the entertainment industry) Copyright Alert System, notifies users that the company has received a complaint about the user's IP address being used to transfer copyrighted material, and asks them to confirm that they've received the notice.

For its part, while the user in question only just noticed the message, Comcast was quick to remind everybody that they've been doing this for several years. "Comcast published all of the technical details of this several years ago in RFC 6108," Comcast engineering VP Jason Livingood states in our forums. He also notes that this "has been regularly covered in prior news articles," and that the "specified method uses the IETF's Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP)." And he's right. We discussed the warning messages in early 2013 when trying to ferret out how ISPs would enforce the entertainment industry's endless game of whac-a-mole attempts to stop users from trading copyrighted files. A similar system is used to notify capped Comcast customers that they've reached their usage limits, and the technology has also been used by ISPs to notify users that their machines may be infected with malware. Of course while nothing new, it's still not something that's looked fondly upon by net purists, who'd prefer Comcast keep its hands out of user traffic streams. Comcast may be required to forward on entertainment industry warnings to retain its safe harbor protections and remain on the good side of entertainment industry execs (including those at Comcast's NBC Universal), but there's nothing that says it has to fiddle with user bits to do so. "Ultimately, if you want an alternative, what is it?" Livingood asks in our forums. Not doing it at all, our users were "Ultimately, if you want an alternative, what is it?" Livingood asks in our forums. Not doing it at all, our users were quick to suggest







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Most recommended from 66 comments

rradina

join:2000-08-08

Chesterfield, MO 920.3 39.3

·Charter

10 recommendations rradina Member To Inject or not to Inject... Some think injection is OK for purposes like this. They justify it because customer's ignore ISP e-mails, phone calls and snail mail letters. Would it be OK for the phone company (wired or wireless) to interrupt the next voice call with a message that requires you to press a key to acknowledge it before continuing with your planned call? If this is OK, where might this end? Is it OK for any company to inject warning messages provided it's similar to why folks feel Comcast is justified? If not, why not? If so, can we define a line in the sand that isn't grossly abused?

buzz_4_20

join:2003-09-20

Biddeford, ME 1 edit 5 recommendations buzz_4_20 Member The Problem Is that what they are doing is considered a man-in-the-middle ATTACK.

Which it is. It's messing with the transmission of data, while not malicious in intent, it is a BAD thing.