Tag: New media

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.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

Two weeks ago, I speculated on applying the “Teaspoon Model” to the problem of protecting small, niche, video streaming markets faced:

• on the one hand with Copyright Protection laws focused on protecting the cash flows of large media distribution middlemen; and,
  
• on the other hand, with a plague of bloodsucking bootleg streaming sites, surviving on miniscule revenue flows because they leech off of everyone – not just the creators of the work themselves, but also fansub and video-rip groups that make the content availbale for download, and free stream hosting sites for the streaming itself
  

Refer to the lovely Shakespeare’s Sister for the teaspoon concept itself – the idea of this application is:

So this is what I was thinking. Perhaps a small, struggling company that wanted to reduce the density of the cloud of bloodsucking flies draining the work of the artists who create this material of market value could gain leverage not by trying to find the Super-Teaspoon – but by recruiting a supporting group, each armed with ordinary teaspoons.

There’d have to be at least one person at the company actually sending out the letters to the sites streaming the bootlegs – but they would be far more effective if backed up by ten or twenty people contributing a couple of hours a week tracking down where the material is located. Indeed, the “white hats” could drop in info on where to get the material legally while at the bootleg bloodsucker streaming sites, including the proliferating opportunities for legal free streams.

The objection has already been raised, “but everybody does it”. But the experiment reported here shows, no, everybody does not sit around passively waiting to get a legal order to Cease and Desist. There are companies that do check out tips and clean out the trash and even YouTube does a far better job than MySpaceCDN.

Note: most graphics are samples from extant Photobucket and Flikr albums, but the “Storm in the Teacup” is an entry from a Photoshop contest, and “You’re Both Idiots” is by ~ZeKarmaMisama who can be found at Deviant Art, and the teaspoon is by Western Australia artist Pearl Rogers

… or is NewsCorp just an Old Media Dinosaur that cannot keep up?

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

Also available in Orange

Breaking the Silicon Cage is for breaking down those barriers that prevent us from leveraging the full potential of the netroots for progressive populist action – whether that involves using the internet for collaboration on works to be delivered live on the street, or breaking down barriers between different social networks on the internet itself.

The latter is what we have here. The progressive blogosphere, if people are to believe our words (though not always our actions) is an enemy of Rupert Murdoch and his Iraq-Invasion-supporting, Conservative-Politician-electing multinational media empire. We in the US know him primarily for the Faux News Channel, but in the UK and Australia they know him for his grossly biased newspaper oligopolies.

If Progressives were indeed intent on taking power (something Cassiodorus questions), we would be eager to take any shots at Rupert Murdch’s Media Empire that we could.

Now, I’m game, and a few others have expressed their interest, but for the most part the reaction of the blogosphere is a big, “why should I become outraged by that in particular”. If the thousands of US service members and hundreds of thousands of lives disrupted – hundreds of thousands of Iraqis kills and millions of Iraqi lives disrupted – is too big a reason to grasp for being outraged at Rupert Murdoch and his media empire … then be outraged for the mother (above right) of Cpl. Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, killed in action in a War of Choice that Rupert Murdoch loudly banged the drum in favor of choosing.

I am sure you have heard of Fox News, owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

This diary is about a direct action against Rupert Murdoch in another dimension of his media empire. It turns out that Rupert Murdoch has the biggest pirate base in the US anime market.

This direct action involves those of us with flat-rate broadband connections right-clicking on a bunch of links and downloading a bunch of bootleg files into a temporary directory – then erasing the files. Since Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace servers host hundreds of bootleg anime streams, from one anime streaming site alone, if enough of us download enough files at the same time – it will increase the amount of money that Rupert’s media empire has to pay to host bootleg anime.

In short, it hits Rupert in his wallet, where it hurts him the most. More, after the fold.

Act on Friday, 6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific, and 10pm Eastern, 7pm Pacific.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

crossposted from My Left Wing

Rupert Murdoch operates and profits from a big pirate support base, and we – I and anyone who joins with me – are going to go after him, in an ongoing “name and shame” operation, until he agrees to close down the pirate support operations at his base.

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

Or, to make a different analogy, Rupert Murdoch owns own of those pawn shops that “just happen” to end up with stolen goods in their possession. That is, some pawn shops in run-down areas of town are just fence. Some are legalized loan sharks that work hard at avoiding being fences. And some respect the letter of the law but, well, if they somehow end up with stolen goods anyway, well, waddyagonnado? “Dese people are here, no respect for private property”.

Few bootleg anime streaming sites would be able to keep operating if they had to pay the cost of streaming the media themselves. Fortunately for them, Rupert is happy to host their bootleg anime on MySpace servers. As long as its not NewsCorp copyright rights, NewsCorp is happy to do the minimum required by the law (I am sure it is just a coincidence that the when ordinary users link to the bootleg media at MySpace, that draws traffic and brings revenue to MySpace).

But who watches out for the little guys?

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

Crossposted from My Left Wing, also available in Orange

When I wrote Can the Teaspoon Model stand up to Bloodsucker Streaming Sites?, it was clear that one reason the bloodsucker leech anime streaming sites are able to offer their “free anime” because they don’t pay streaming costs either. They rely on pointing their users to places that host the streams.

They are, in other words, an aggregator. People that know how to look and where to look collect the information, and they put a shell around it to make it convenient to the user. They live off a trickle of net advertisements and donations – and of course, nothing ever gets back to the animators, voice actors and actresses, producers, directors who actually create the work.

And if the anime was unavailable in this country, they could argue they are “growing the market”. But of course, an increasing amount of this media is available for legitimate free streaming, supported by a range of internet ads, streaming ads, and subscription models – which does feed income back to the industry that creates these collaborate works.

But the real problem is the hosts for the streams. Without the free hosting of bootleg streams, these leech bloodsucker sites could never afford to offer, as one of these sites boasts, “503 series, 7,657 anime episodes”. Its the ability to point to free streams of bootleg copies provided by someone else that allows the bloodsucker leech sites to spoil the market for legitimate streaming sites.

Over the last little while, I have been essaying about the New Media Economy, from What Can Newspaper Reporting Learn from Yuricon? through Can the Hero Model Save the Publishing Industry? to Can the Teaspoon Model stand up to Bloodsucker Streaming Sites?.

Now, Rupert Murdoch, NewsCorp, and Fox are real big advocates of respect for copyright:

Fox sued Warner Bros. in 2008, alleging that the studio and the movie’s producer, Larry Gordon, failed to obtain the rights from Fox, where the project had been in development.

The studios did not announce details of the settlement. But under the terms of an agreement hammered out over recent days, Warner Bros. agreed to pay Fox as much as 8.5% of the film’s gross receipts plus about $1.5 million to cover the movie’s development costs, according to a person familiar with the situation. The agreement extends to sequels or spinoffs, the person said.

So when Japanese anime is streamed by bootleg video streaming sites – why is Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace happy to continue host the videos, even after they have been informed that the material is bootleg material? Indeed, in some of the videos you can see the logo of the site that is providing legal free streams – since the bootleg was made by a “premium” subscriber to the legal streaming service.

Is Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace and Twentieth Century Fox breaking the law? Well, no – that is, they have the legal right to wait until the copyright owner notifies them of the violation.

Which is the point of the system that the Big Corporations have set up. A big firm with lucrative media can set up a unit to regularly sweep through internet for bootleg copies, and issue a legal Cease and Desist letter. But a smaller New Media company, in a smaller niche market – a smaller niche market that has seen four distribution companies shut down, restructure or go bankrupt in the last four years – does not necessarily have the resources for that operation.

And Murdoch’s MySpace will continue streaming videos for bootleg “free anime” – until made to stop.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage

crossposted from ProgressiveBlue

A little while back I saw a Tweet about one of these bloodsucker bootleg anime sites from debaoki, manga blogger at About.Com:Manga. So I want to check it out, and a little conversation ensued … (NB: skip to the last section if you’ve heard all of this before)

The post that Deb Aoki pointed to was a whining complaint about getting a “Cease and Desist” letter from the American anime distribution house Funimation to take down links to bootleg copies of the works that Funimation licenses. The list (shown an item per line at AnimesFree.com) was:

Afro Samurai, Air, Air Gear, Baccano!, Baki the Grappler, Basilisk, Beck, Black Blood Brothers, Black Cat, Black Lagoon, Blassreiter, Burst Angel, Claymore, D.Gray-Man, Darker than Black, Desert Punk, Devil May Cry, Elemental Gelade, Ergo Proxy, Fate Stay Night, Fruits Basket, Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Ghost Hunt, Great Teacher Onizuka, Gunslinger Girl, Hellsing Ultimate, Jyu-Oh-Sei, Love Hina, Lovely Complex, Magikano, One Piece, Ouran High School Host Club, Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom~, Samurai 7, Samurai Champloo , Shuffle!, Strike Witches, Trinity Blood, Welcome to the NHK, Xenosaga, xxxHOLiC, Casshern Sins and Eden of the East

From the Las Vegas Sun:

Christian Avard works on a Web posting Monday for www.docudharma.com inside “The Big Tent,” where Web writers ply their trade near the Democratic National Conven-tion. “This is a long way from the gold lame of the Riv,” says a Democratic strategist, referring to the Riviera, which hosted a convention two years ago for liberal bloggers.

Our intrepid reporter Christian Avard and Docudharma are featured prominently above a nice article about New Media/blogging by J. Patrick Coolican. I like his first paragraph!

DENVER – This is the headquarters of the vast left-wing conspiracy. They’re all here: MoveOn.org, Media Matters and Markos Moulitsas, and if a bomb went off, Bill O’Reilly wouldn’t be disappointed.

There is also a nice comment from John Podesta, President Clinton’s ex chief of staff on how blogging has changed the relationships in politics and journalism. Go read the article, though of course, the picture is worth a thousand words!

More blogging on blogging below the fold, as we bloggers say!