NEW YORK, NY — Comcast Corp. wants to develop what it calls an industry-wide “Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” (BRR) for file sharing. The terms would dovetail with the company’s evolving policy about users who trade images, sound, videos and games online.Currently under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission because of complaints that it interferes with subscribers’ internet traffic, Comcast has promised to treat all traffic the same instead of throttling the bandwidth of users the company suspects of file-swapping. On March 27th, Comcast announced it would collaborate with BitTorrent and the broader internet and ISP community to determine how bandwidth-hogging applications and users and the companies whose networks are impacted by the traffic can coexist peacefully.

Although file-sharing networks are havens for copyright pirates, the networks are used more and more often as legitimate distribution avenues, especially for smaller companies.

Pando Networks Inc., a “provider of managed peer-to-peer content delivery services” according to its backgrounder, already has signed on to help develop and promote the BRR. The two companies plan to collaborate and work with industry experts, other internet service providers and P2P companies, content providers and others to establish a framework for the BRR, which they hope will be viewed as a set of best-practices guidelines. The stated goal of the project is to clarify what choices and controls consumers should have when using P2P applications as well as what processes and practices ISPs should use to manage P2P applications running on their networks.

In addition, Comcast and Pando plan to conduct a test of Pando’s Network Aware™ P2P technology on Comcast’s fiber-optic network. The companies intend to capture and analyze the dataflow associated with downloading a file using Pando’s P2P application. The tests, along with tests Pando will conduct on a variety of other ISP networks including cable, DSL, fiber and wireless, will measure things like performance, speed, distance and geography as well as the bandwidth-consumption impact on the ISPs.

Comcast, Pando and the P4P Working Group of the Digital Computing Industry Association plan to publish the results of the tests so other ISPs can benefit from understanding how P2P applications might be optimized for traveling over networks in varying environments and geographies.

The Pando test will provide additional data to help Comcast migrate to a protocol-agnostic network management technique by the end of this year, the companies said.

“Working together, Comcast and Pando can help lead the discussion about what consumers should expect in terms of a ‘P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities’ for P2P users and ISPs,” said Comcast Chief Technology Officer Tony Werner. “Doing so is in the best interest of everyone involved: ISPs, P2P companies and consumers. We hope to get other industry experts, ISPs and P2P companies together this spring and publish the ‘P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities’ later this year. By having this framework in place, we will help P2P companies, ISPs and content owners find common ground to support consumers who want to use P2P applications to deliver legal content.”

Of course, the threat of federal regulation appears to be on Comcast’s mind, as well. On Tuesday, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told the Washington Post the BRR project is “another example of how we can work with the industry to solve these issues rather than getting the government involved.”

He added ISPs are worried federal regulation would lag behind rapid changes in technology.