Charter cable kneecaps a subscriber
So, you think you can bypass your cable company by trading copies of The Sopranos over BitTorrent? That’s what this guy thought, too:
HBO has been watching. Then they went and tattled on me to Charter.
The download at issue is the second episode of the latest season of The Sopranos. All 359 megabytes of it. The people representing HBO recommended that Charter terminate my service. Charter basically said not to do it again or else they “will have no choice but to terminate” my account.
Read the comments and you’ll see that he was using the Peer Guardian program, which supposedly protects P2P connections from snoops.
He posted PDF copies of the warning letter from Charter and the original Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice from HBO to Charter.
Tony S. would be proud.
(via Lost Remote)
I call shenanigans. The font used in the letter, Trebuchet MS, isn’t typically used by professional organizations in print (it’s a screen font), Charter Communications is actually Charter Communications, Inc. (the “official” name is an important thing for a company to use in an official letter), and the rep that sent the letter notifying Charter couldn’t spell for beans.
Charter would also have sent the letter addressing him by his name; legal notices are made to a person, not to a “subscriber / john doe”, when the name is known. Shenanigans!
Dustin, you might be right, but if you go to Charter’s Web page, you’ll see that it consistently refers to the company as Charter Communications, with no Inc. (See the lower right corner of the home page, for instance. Or the About Us page.
In addition, SafeNet really exists and does exactly what this e-mail claims they do. See this page for details.
So, there may be some reason to doubt the facts in this case, but it’s not a slam dunk.
As the author of the blog in question, I can assure you the letter is the real deal. When my story was moved to the front page of Digg.com, I was simply amazed at the amount of people who believed this was nothing more than HBO propaganda. Look at the rest of my blog. It’s all boring crap that most people wouldn’t want to read. There may be several posts that people I don’t know will find useful, but they are few and far between.
I just found out a blog that links to my story has been moved to the front page of Digg.com, so I’m expecting another avalanche of comments — good, bad and indifferent.
Ed, thank you for mentioning I was using PeerGuardian at the time. I probably should have mentioned it in the original blog. It just slipped my mind at the time of the post. I was more concerned with the fact that, after years of downloading various things, I had finally been caught.