What happened to you is fairly common, except for the letter you got which was most likely due to them getting threats from the evil MPAA.
I have worked at various ISP's and they all try to discourage people running servers. Most user accounts were designed and priced for surfing, with more expensive accounts for businesses and web servers.
The problem is there is no automatic way to tell if a customer is using their connection for personal or buisness use. I can't remember ever sending customers bills, but we did cancel and refund accounts when they tried to run their business web server on a personal account.
Your ISP certianly is over the line on this one, but they do have a reson for being touchy about the subject.
They stole disk compression code and got.. slapped.
And then did it again and got.. slapped.
Repeat until the end of time.
I can't think of any judgment against Microsoft that was harsh enough to really annoy them. THe current case certianly isn't going anywhere thanks to that idiot judge and the new adminstrations business friendly attitude.
To me, this makes it even worse. Yet another obvious software patent. I read their breif and they claim that "pointers to functions" and "look up tabels for patterns" is somehow brilliant enough to patent?
I had themes on my Commodore 64! I wrote a program to change the default colors of the background, border and text color, change the font and even modify how basic programs were listed. Anyone who uses a computer for five minuts will think, "Gee, I wish I could change this..."
The patent looks clearly unenforcable. Unfortunatly, if you have the money you can defent even outragous patents against small companies with no lawyer herd.
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What happened to you is fairly common, except for the letter you got which was most likely due to them getting threats from the evil MPAA.
I have worked at various ISP's and they all try to discourage people running servers. Most user accounts were designed and priced for surfing, with more expensive accounts for businesses and web servers.
The problem is there is no automatic way to tell if a customer is using their connection for personal or buisness use. I can't remember ever sending customers bills, but we did cancel and refund accounts when they tried to run their business web server on a personal account.
Your ISP certianly is over the line on this one, but they do have a reson for being touchy about the subject.
What DID happen to Microsoft?
They stole disk compression code and got.. slapped.
And then did it again and got.. slapped.
Repeat until the end of time.
I can't think of any judgment against Microsoft that was harsh enough to really annoy them. THe current case certianly isn't going anywhere thanks to that idiot judge and the new adminstrations business friendly attitude.
To me, this makes it even worse. Yet another obvious software patent. I read their breif and they claim that "pointers to functions" and "look up tabels for patterns" is somehow brilliant enough to patent?
I had themes on my Commodore 64! I wrote a program to change the default colors of the background, border and text color, change the font and even modify how basic programs were listed. Anyone who uses a computer for five minuts will think, "Gee, I wish I could change this..."
The patent looks clearly unenforcable. Unfortunatly, if you have the money you can defent even outragous patents against small companies with no lawyer herd.