Comcast SVP Rich Woundy told the audience of the DCIA’s P2P Media Summit in Los Angeles on Monday that his company is not spearheading the creation of a P2P Bill of Rights anymore. Instead, Comcast will take part in a newly formed working group of the Distributed Computing Industry Association that aims to define best practices for the P2P industry.

Comcast had proposed a set of guidelines called “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities for P2P Users and Service Providers” in cooperation with the P2P startup Pando less than three weeks ago. The proposal came just two days before an FCC hearing at Stanford University about Comcast’s ongoing practice of throttling BitTorrent traffic. The suspicious timing and the vague wording of the proposed guidelines were some of the reasons why consumer rights groups decried them as “ludicrous.” The DCIA now hopes to start a more substantial dialogue among ISPs, P2P companies and rights holders, but statements from movie industry execs made at the association’s Media Summit show that this won’t be a walk in the park either. Read more of this story

Comcast said today it plans to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” in cooperation with P2P companies and other ISPs. The bill proposal is being co-spearheaded by Pando Networks, a company that recently made waves with its efforts to help ISPs with the impact P2P is having on their networks without throttling traffic. Comcast is also committing to test Pando’s technology and share those test results with the ISP community.

The bill itself is supposed to be a catalog of best-practice recommendations for P2P companies and ISPs alike, but the announcement was more than vague about what those recommendations might look like. It did mention that users should be able to “control their computers’ resources when using P2P applications,” but it didn’t specify which responsibilities and especially which rights Comcast wants to include for ISPs.

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Hollywood has been stepping up its demands for ISP-based P2P filters in recent weeks, with the MPAA suggesting that such filters would help unclog the Internet’s tubes. But how well do P2P-filtering appliances really work? The French music industry association SNEP recently teamed up with Internet Evolution to find out. The idea was to run an extensive test with products from dozens of vendors and publish the results online so that ISPs could make informed decisions.

Well that was the idea. Most of the device manufactures balked at this degree this transparency — 28 vendors were invited to take part in the six-month test; 24 of them declined. And three of the remaining five decided that they didn’t agree with the test results and refused to have them published. So what’s the filtering industry so scared of? Maybe it’s the fact that its products just don’t work that well.

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Do your torrent downloads seem to be taking longer than usual? Are you trying to transfer, say, a home video to a friend via Pando and the upload keeps getting stuck? Or maybe you’re having problems with BitTorrent’s new streaming service, which just doesn’t seem to work on your system? There’s a good chance your ISP is at fault, as more and more providers are putting the brakes on BitTorrent these days.

Though Comcast was the first to make headlines with its anti-P2P policy, a bunch of other ISPs in the U.S. and elsewhere are throttling BitTorrent traffic as well. Take, for example, Bell Canada, or Germany’s Kabel Deutschland. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to tell if your ISP is one of the bad guys — we’ve pulled together five tests that will do it for you.

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Legaltorrents.com, one of the oldest and most prominent destinations for legal BitTorrent downloads, is relaunching today, and its new version offers a bunch of new features for users and content creators alike, among them a donation system to offer content creators a way to monetize P2P. Advanced community and content discovery features are slated to be added in the coming months.

When Legaltorrents first launched, back in 2003, the services and functions it offered — such as seed hosting for content creators, and enabling users an easy way to download a gigabyte’s worth of Creative Commons-licensed music in a single torrent — were remarkable and somewhat revolutionary. Legaltorrents was also one of the first sites to experiment with the combination of BitTorrent and RSS enclosures to automatically subscribe to downloads — a technology that today is at the core of players like Miro, and as well as numerous TV torrent download sites. The notion of legal content distribution through torrent sites has since moved into the mainstream as well; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently openly embraced The Pirate Bay and Mininova, while Vuze.com carries shows from the likes of PBS and Showtime alongside user-generated content.

So how is the new Legaltorrents going to compete in this new, BitTorrent-friendly world?

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The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently made a bold decision to release an episode of the show Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister through BitTorrent. The move was remarkable not only because the national broadcaster decided to go completely ad- and DRM-free, but because it openly embraced platforms that are usually known for pirated content, the Pirate Bay and Mininova.org.

But the experience has taught CBC a valuable lesson: Play with the outlaws, and you’re going to be treated like one. Numerous users have reported being unable to access the show downloads due to ISP-based BitTorrent throttling. To make matters worse, telecom company Bell Canada has just begun to throttle P2P traffic for all of its wholesale customers, potentially affecting a huge number of customers of other ISPs that resell Bell’s DSL service.

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