Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon CageThis 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 ParticipateThe 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
media@Hulu.com 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.
... for Progressive Populism ... for the Arc of the Sun ... for the Next American Revolution ... for Living Energy Independence ... for a Brawny Recovery ... 
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