Online games stealing your bandwidth

[jlewis at lewis.org (Jon Lewis)]

On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Rodrick Brown wrote:

> If you follow the links in the article people are complaining that the LotR
> process has served 70gb in a week, others are complaining that the service
> is resulting in 300ms pings, and unusable connections.
> This is a very grey area it will be interesting how this issue unfolds in
> the long run.

I haven't played any of these things, so I don't know what they put in 
the fine print, but unless LotR makes it clear that they're going to 
utilize your (i.e. players of the game) bandwidth to PTP distribute their 
software, I'd call that theft and unauthorized use of a computer network.
Are these companies not making enough in monthly subscriptions to afford 
Akamai or similar CDN services to distribute their software updates?

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