Skip to main content

Rightscorp is trying to punish pirates, but Comcast isn’t cooperating

rightscorp comcast dmca takedown isp illegal download downloading
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The battle between those who hold copyrights on content and the people who want to download them illegally is a constant one. At times, copyright holders will employ firms like Rightscorp, which attempts to punish illegal downloaders by contacting their Internet service providers and chucking DMCA threats and fines at them.

However, that requires ISPs to play along with Rightscorp. There’s one that doesn’t though: Comcast.

Comcast has become somewhat of a thorn in the side of Rightscorp. Here’s how it works: Rightscorp will send a DMCA statement to the ISP pertaining to a downloader’s activities, which includes all sorts of threatening language. Comcast, in turn, takes that statement, strips out all of the threatening text, and instead turns the statement into a report that essentially points out what the ISP’s customer did. This includes stuff like a timestamp, what they downloaded, an IP address, and the site where they downloaded it from. 

Comcast’s inactivity on the matter could be a measure to protect its user base. Any ISP that assists firms like Rightscorp by targeting its user base is clearly in danger of losing that customer and driving them straight into the arms of another ISP. 

Considering that Comcast is a huge Internet Service Provider in the U.S., it would be interesting to see whether other ISPs will follow Comcast’s lead down the line.

Editors' Recommendations

Konrad Krawczyk
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…
The case for XR at work isn’t going away just yet
A vision of Meta's metaverse in the work setting.

There was a lot of hope in the mid-2010s that virtual reality would take off and become the next big thing in home entertainment. Many brands invested in VR headsets that would be connected to PCs and gaming consoles to take users seamlessly from a 2D environment to an immersive 3D world. While enthusiasts might have jumped on the bandwagon quickly, many consumers have yet to invest in the ever-prevalent technology, much to the chagrin of Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his burgeoning metaverse.

The concept of VR hasn't gone away and has gradually morphed into extended reality (XR) via further upgrades as we progress into the mid-2020s. Hardware has become smaller, lighter, and wireless. Companies including Meta and Apple market their XR headsets, the Meta Quest 3 and the Apple Vision Pro respectively, as entertainment devices with several enterprise capabilities built in. But other companies are taking a different approach.
Lenovo's vision of XR

Read more
Don’t believe the hype — the era of native resolution gaming isn’t over
Alan Wake looking at a projection of himself.

Native resolution is dead, or so the story goes. A string of PC games released this year, with the most recent being Alan Wake 2, have come under fire for basically requiring some form of upscaling to achieve decent performance. Understandably, there's been some backlash from PC gamers, who feel as if the idea of running a game at native resolution is quickly becoming a bygone era.

There's some truth to that, but the idea that games will rely on half-baked upscalers to achieve reasonable performance instead of "optimization" is misguided at best -- and downright inaccurate at worst. Tools like Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) will continue to be a cornerstone of PC gaming, but here's why they can't replace native resolution entirely.
The outcry
Let's start with why PC gamers have the impression that native resolution is dead. The most recent outcry came over Alan Wake 2 when the system requirements revealed that the game was built around having either DLSS or FSR turned on. That's not a new scenario, either. The developers of Remnant 2 confirmed the game was designed around upscaling, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a AAA release in the last few years that didn't pack in upscaling tech.

Read more
AMD isn’t just copying Nvidia’s homework with FSR 3
Frank Azor presenting AMD's FSR 3 at Gamescom.

After nearly a year of waiting, AMD has finally shared more details on its upcoming FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3). If you've seen the original announcement you know what to expect -- it's AMD's FSR upscaling combined with something called Fluid Motion Frames to multiply frame rates. The big news? It works with any GPU.

Well, not technically any GPU. AMD says its Fluid Motion Frames works on anything from the original RDNA generation (RX 5000) and newer, but that includes GPUs from Nvidia and Intel. It's a much different approach than Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling 3 (DLSS 3). The DLSS Frame Generation feature not only requires an Nvidia RTX GPU, but specifically one from the most recent generation like the RTX 4070.

Read more