P2P News – what started the month

At the beginning of this month what made the news was the FCC hearing related to the Comcast's habit to "delay" BitTorrent uploads. Not surprinsingly, this practice has revived the net neutrality issue, because distribution companies like Vuze (Azureus) charge the tactic harms their business model and offering Comcast an inequitable advantage. Though the testimony raised a few eyebrows, the interesting part concerns what went on during the hearing.

A week ago, Comcast was put through the mill by the FCC panel who demanded some answers from the cable company's representatives. According to Slycknews at some point in the opening speech, Rep. Ed Markey made Comcast aware that "Such intercession into a user's access to the Internet should not result in…the transformation of BitTorrent into BitTrickle."

As we learned afterwards, the following day it was found out that the cable company in question had paid individuals to line up prior to the hearing. Comcast claims it only paid "a few" people for that, yet as later discovered, hundreds of disposed participants had to be sent away. As expected, this did not appeal to the FCC and apparently is thus seriously thinking to attend another hearing.

To put the emphasis on the digital music scene, the NPD Group found that people are purchasing more music although they are spending less. This is not at all a paradox – digital music is considerably cheaper than physical CDs, and because tracks cost around 99 cents and full albums around $5, is understandable that people can buy a greater volume than in the previous years and still pay comparatively little. Although the music companies have done a relatively good job with the creation of a digital music market, however they actually lack the demand to compensate for the approaching death of the CD.

It seems pretty hard to start or end a week without mentioning without the Pirate Bay. Two weeks ago, TorrentFreak reported that Yahoo! had blocked The Pirate Bay from some of its global websites. So if you search for The Pirate Bay on Yahoo.com you will not be directed to the BitTorrent tracker's website, but if you type the same request on Yahoo.se you will. Apparently, quite a few publications tried to learn more about the matter directly from Yahoo! but eventually had to content themselves with what they were suspecting as no official statement was made by Yahoo!.