My colleague Liz Gannes published a great piece titled “Copyright Meets a New Worthy Foe: The Real-Time Web” over at Newteevee today. The main premise: Traditional DMCA take-down notices can’t keep up with Ustream and Justin.tv anymore. Users can just jump onto streams in no time, and live events may be over before anyone could even send out an appropriate notice.

One of the aspects of the article that found really intriguing was the combination of the live web and the social graph:

“Ustream CEO John Ham says he’s seen live video feeds go from zero to a million viewers faster than ever before after being shared on Facebook and Twitter.”

Liz doesn’t present a definite solution to this problem, probably because there isn’t just one, but she does hint at a few possibilities, one of them being this:

“(I)t’s not easy for people who start aligned as enemies to become friends. If sports leagues were to embrace Justin.tv as their viral marketing engine…well, that would be something.” Read more »

Peer-to-peer traffic management was a hot topic at this year’s NXTcomm convention in Las Vegas, as keynote speakers and telecommunications industry panelists highlighted new methods for handling P2P traffic crunches.

Internet service providers’ methods for managing P2P traffic have come under intense scrutiny in recent months after the Associated Press reported last year that Comcast Corp. was actively interfering with P2P users’ ability to upload files by sending TCP RST packets that informed them that their connection would have to be reset.

Because the RST packets did not appear to be sent directly from the company, critics accused Comcast of deceiving its customers and actively blocking their ability to share files online.

Although Comcast has said it doesn’t actively block any P2P protocols and merely “delays” P2P uploads during times of heavy congestion, the company has agreed to change its P2P traffic management policies and stop targeting traffic such as that of BitTorrent. Read more »