Friday Hours of Action against Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp

(10:00PM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

This is week 3 of the Hours of Action against bootleg streaming by servers from inside Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp media empire.

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

Part of the point here is to Call Out Rupert and NewsCorp on their institutionalized Hypocrisy, as Rupert goes around lecturing countries on Copyright Piracy while various crevices of his media empire are passively streaming bootlegs in competition against serious and audience-friendly efforts to adapt to the New Media economy.

Part of the point is just to attack Rupert and and the senior executive management of Newscorp for being a bunch of dirtbags.

Part of the point is an experiment in whether the blogosphere can be of use for more than a talkshop and campaign season ATM machine for politicians claiming to be “progressive”.

And part of it is curiosity – I am, after all, one of the minority of economists with an interest in how the real world economy works and evolves, beyond the blinkered confines of calculus-based models of non-evolving mechanical systems.

If you want to know more, there’s a remote chance I’ve already said it, so check out the “story so far” links below.

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 60Mbyte-110MB, 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.

The Story So Far

Episode 1: Can the Teaspoon Model stand up to Bloodsucker Streaming Sites?:

I relate my encounter with the free anime streaming site, as their complaining about being forced to stop linking to FUNimation streams hits twitter streams that I follow. When the complaint hit twitter, it turned out that there is a segment of the anime fanbase that is opposed to bootlegs anime streams in competition with the licensed streams that actually provide revenue back into the industry – which is facing much of the same turbulence in the evolving New Media economy that the magazine and newspaper publishing industries are. I speculate on whether a fan-based system might be able to protect the ability of legit anime streaming sites to make a go of it.

Episode 2: Direct Action against Fox …: In investigating the economics of bootleg streaming, it struck me how many of the streams seem to be hosted at 20th Century Fox servers – part of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp media empire. And so came the idea of Operation Direct Action Citizen Starving Artist Protection Tax, OK! (Operation OK! for short). 13 people vote to go ahead, so I decide to charge ahead.

Episode 3: Rupert Murdoch has the Biggest Pirate Base in the US Anime Market: I did further exploration, sampling the first episodes in each series on the site from the #’s and A through F (for FOX). It turned out that MySpaceCDN and MySpace were not just common free streaming hosts – they were the most popular free streaming hosts. It has since become clear that calling it a Pirate Base is confusing – Rupert’s servers are more accurately a Pirate Support Base. That is, they do not do the piracy itself, they just either tolerate or are incompetent at suppressing the use of their facilities by people that they themselves label as “Copyright Pirates”.

Episode 4: Action Hours Against Rupert the Pirate: Week One: Week One was the first experiment in the Direct Action. Of course, until the Action Hours are big enough to spur the vicious sociopath that is NewsCorp into action … (NB. All Corporations are intrinisically sociopaths, the extra Viciousness likely comes from Rupert and the kind of top people he picks for his media empire) … we won’t know how successful it was, but for the people taking part, the practice of being an active citizen is as important in its own way as regular physical exercise.

Episode 5: Direct Action: Charging Fox Noise Owner Rupert Murdoch a Pirate Base Tax: In the second week, I did not do a lot of writing, as I was learning how to script the process of datamining for more efficiency in harvesting links. I did, however, share a video on the debate at the leeching anime stream site by MarzGurl.

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Episode 6: Is Rupert Murdoch Picking His Partner’s Pockets …: After harvesting the links for all the series I can find that are competing against legit streams, it becomes clear that I underestimated the importance of MySpaceCDN, at least for the case-study site. I speculate whether these servers are so open to streaming bootleg anime because there is some financial incentive more critical than the success of the Hulu.com joint venture – the “Pickpocket” hypothesis – or whether its just because NewsCorp is not structured to be able to cope efficiently with this kind of issue – the “Dinosaur” hypothesis (NB. the Dinosaur of the meme, not necessarily the Dinosaurs as they actually existed). I lean toward the Old Media Dinosaur explanation.

Episode 7: The Teaspoon Model Versus Rupert Murdoch’s Pirate Support Base: I report on the results of an experiment I conducted on Monday, emailing NBC/Universal and Disney/ABC for their comment on what might be motivating NewsCorp to be so lax in controlling for bootleg stream competition from NewsCorp’s own servers, including as “proof” a long list of links. The email was also cc’d to the copyright control addresses of many of the primary hosts that the bloodsucker streaming site streamed from. Veoh.com, Imeem.com and Megavideo.com emerged as “White Hats” that pro-actively cleaned out the bootleg files without having to be forced to do so by threat of lawsuit.

In this episode as well, I passed on the news that traffic at MySpace has fallen off so much that Google appears likely to be paying $100m less than originally expected to NewsCorp in its exclusive search advertising deal with NewsCorp when NewsCorp bought MySpace. Some might feel this makes the “Pickpocket” hypothesis more likely, but I still lean to the “Decrepit Old Media Dinosaur” hypothesis.

The Legit Anime Streaming Distributers

I previously intermixed links to the corresponding legitimate streams with the list, but this week, I will instead put the links to the series from legit Anime streaming distributors being undermined by NewsCorp here, and the (long) list of MySpaceCDN links itself below. The focus this week is series where MySpaceCDN is supporting streaming against Crunchyroll, the anime fanvideo site that went legitimate this year and now provides about half the Japanese fall season on free streams about a week after broadcast.

Crunchyroll series:

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.

Full financial interest disclosure: I am a Crunchyroll paid subscriber, so if they go bankrupt, I am out some part of my $7 monthly subscription fee.

Many of these series are also available at Joost, where you can also find FUNimation titles.

The List

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

2 comments

- BruceMcF on November 6, 2009 at 19:36
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… amazing how a little automation makes the links-mining go much quicker.
- BruceMcF on November 8, 2009 at 04:32
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… aren’t I going to get in trouble for monopolizing the front page?

Good thing y’all didn’t wait until the Sunday Train was up and go for three in a row, y’would’ve given me a ‘eart attack.

Just for that I am going to biggify the picture.

Friday Hours of Action against Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp

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