time warner cable

While everyone was worried over whether AT&T would be acquiring T-Mobile USA or not, Verizon was making some sneaky moves to acquire a truckload of spectrum for their 4G LTE network.

On December 2, Verizon Wireless announced its intent to acquire all 122 licenses of the AWS-1 spectrum that SpectrumCo, LLC held.

AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable have all signed an agreement with the RIAA and MPAA to enact a new in-house program to quell internet piracy.

Sounds terrible, but there’s a bright side: It might actually stave off harsher measures that would otherwise be taken against would-be pirates.

The big broadband providers have long been fighting local community/muni broadband efforts, passing laws and making ridiculous claims about those efforts.

The real point is that these service providers don't want competition and want to charge monopoly prices.

While I have my concerns about how effectively some community broadband projects can work, the attempts to legally block them go way overboard -- especially in North Carolina.

In 2010, adult movie company Larry Flynt Productions embarked on a project to extract hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements from alleged BitTorrent pirates.

In October, through lawyer Evan Stone, the company filed several lawsuits which sought the identities of several thousand Internet users said to have infringed copyright.

The big ISPs, especially Comcast and Time Warner Cable, have intervened for months in massive file-sharing lawsuits, telling judges that they simply can't drop all of their activity for law enforcement in order to spend weeks doing IP address lookups on behalf of pornographers.

And, when the ISPs get the chance to make their arguments before judges, they routinely go beyond complaints about the workload and challenge the very basis of the mass lawsuits.

One recent case serves as a good example. Last November, the large New York law firm of Foley & Lardner jumped into the P2

In the middle of December, we wrote about a judge in West Virginia tossing out all but one of the defendants in one of the many, many "mass" copyright infringement lawsuits that were filed in 2010.

The same judge has also done the same with another of the lawsuits, dropping 7,097 defendants.

This one involved the movie Batman XXX: A Porn Parody, from Axel Braun Productions.

Back in August, we wrote about a NY Times article insisting that the cable companies had beaten the internet and the idea that people would "cut the cord" and get their TV from the internet was something of a myth.

The centerpiece of the story was a single anecdote of a guy who tried to just watch TV on the internet, but went back to cable.