Action: Citizen’s Tax on Rupert ‘the Pirate’ Murdoch

Check last week’s review of the story so far.

Act on Friday, 4pm and 10pm Eastern, 1pm and 7pm Pacific.

The diary this week is to throw the floor open. I have listed the various reasons why I am happy to impose a Direct Action Citizen’s Tax on Rupert “The Pirate” Murdoch. The focus this week is on you. What do you have against Rupert “The Pirate” Murdoch?

His Hypocrisy?
His War-Mongering?
His Vicious Union-Busting Politics?
The further destruction of our political discourse, also known as “Fox News”?
His ongoing fight in support of monopoly power in the media?
…or whatever – share it in the comments.

The ongoing story of the “Teaspoon Model” is below the fold, and after that, instructions on how to impose the Direct Action Citizen’s Tax, and The List.

Yesterday (Thursday), I used the scripting tools I developed last week, and took it to two larger bootleg streaming sites. I focused on the bootlegs they were streaming in competition with the site Crunchyroll.

Rupert Murdoch’s MySpaceCDN servers are the biggest streaming support host at one of the two, and second biggest at the other, which had a strong preference for MegaVideo. However, as discussed last week, in the first Teaspoon Model experiment, MegaVideo was among the three “White Hats” – Megavideo, Veoh, and Imeem – simply taking out the trash when they were cc:’d the list sent to the rights owner, without seeming to wait around for the formal Cease and Desist letter.

That is not to say I assume they view it as a sacrifice – Veoh and Megavideo are pursuing models of ad-supported streaming, and most advertisers are reluctant to be associated with bootleg, unlicensed content. But from the perspective of a beleaguered niche media industry like the US Anime industry, the attitude of the hosts that receive many of these uploads is encouraging.

How many? Let me tabulate the main hosts on the three sites I have explored so far.

Host	1st Site	2nd Site	3rd Site	total
MySpaceCDN	461	911	419	1,791
MegaVideo	81	725	969	1,775
Hidden*	47	594	0	641
Veoh	22	0*	497	519
YouTube***	18	20	112	150
Video.Mail.ru	0	56	58	114
Clip.vn	0	13	70	83
MySpace	47	13	93	153

Notes

{* One site relies heavily on “hiding” its links. Preliminary investigation indicates that these are links that it is hiding from other streaming sites “stealing” them, since once the link is translated to text, it points to a location in its host called “/damnthief/”, which translates the Id text into an off-site stream. I believe many of these are streamed from Veoh.

The irony of uploading bootleg animes to leech of free hosting sites in competition against streaming sites like Crunchyroll that pay the original creators is likely lost on them.}

{** Youtube numbers are inflated, since two or three YouTube clips are normally required for one anime episode.}

It is just a sample of the links in “the list” below, but all of the list will be forwarded to the rights owner – and I’ll be reporting on the result next week.

What the Action is and How to Participate

The Action consists of charging the MySpaceCDN servers, owned by NewsCorp Subsidiary 20th Century Fox, a “tax” by requesting that they do the same thing for us that they are doing for the bootleg anime streaming sites – stream the file. Bandwidth costs money, and while any one of us as an individual cannot use a noticeable amount of bandwidth, if we all do it at the same time, and bring our friends in on the action, it can start to add up.

How to participate. Note that you should be sure that you are on a broadband system without a bandwidth surcharge – the point is to impose a Direct Citizen Tax on Rupert’s media empire, not to impose a tax on participants.

What you do is emulate the process that the streaming players use – except by skipping the streaming playing, you have greater ability to download multiple streams at the same time. Right click on the links and save them to disk. For the first one, create a temporary directory to save them into. Then when they are downloaded, delete the temporary directory.

Each file will be about 60Mbyte-80MB, so if your hard drive space is limited, you could, if you wished, download a batch, delete the downloads and empty your trash, then repeat.

I’ve already emailed Hulu.com, copied to MySpace and 20th Century Fox, to alert them to the bootleg streaming taking place from MySpaceCDN servers. So you could also, if you wish, send an email to [email protected] and ask them whether they are serious about continuing as an ad-supported free streaming, and if they are, whether they have been forwarding these links to the copyright owners for action, or else requesting that NewsCorp, one of their owners, takes action itself to remove the bootleg streams they provide in competition with Hulu.com’s licensed streams.

The links are a long list below the rundown on the diaries posted on this issue over the past three weeks as I have been learning things and passing them on.

Act on Friday, 4pm and 10pm Eastern, 1pm and 7pm Pacific.

By request, I am working on a way to automate this, since the command-line web tool “wget” has an option to download and erase a file using the web address.

A selected list of some of the Crunchyroll series available for free streaming, competing against parasite sites: 11Eyes, The Book of Bantorra, Aoi Hana, Asura_Cryin, CODE GEASS: Lelouch of the Rebellion, Fairy Tale, Hanasakeru Seishonen, Miracle Train, Naruto Shippuden, Sasameki Koto, Shugo Chara, Sora No Otoshimono, Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee, White Album.

The List

Action: Citizen’s Tax on Rupert ‘the Pirate’ Murdoch

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