Weekend Bike Blogging: Bike Boxes I Can Believe In

In the store, or at the airport, a "bike box" is a box that is supposed to have a bike inside of it.

However, at an intersection, a "bike box" is when you make a space at an intersection ahead of the "traffic stop here" line. They are often combined, as in the picture, with a "protected by paint and optimism" bike lane. In some cases for traffic lights that are tripped by stopped vehicle detectors, as in the YouTube clip below, they include a more sensitive stopped bike detectors in the bike box, so that the sensitivity of the regular vehicle detector does not have to be adjusted.

Looking at the overall concept, as [http://bikexprt.com/bikepol/facil/stopline.htm John Allen does in A LOOK INTO THE "BIKE BOX"], this is yet another case of, probably subconscious "if only we could kill off these cyclists we wouldn't have to worry about them" thinking by traffic planners.

One thing the bike box does is amplify the encouragement of the regular "protected by paint", aka "kill the cyclist", bike lane to pass stopped motor vehicles on their right side. This is a practice that you can get away with day after day, but sooner or later you are going to end up trying to go straight when a car is trying to turn. And given the fact that the car is risking its pain job and you are risking an extended stay in the hospital, that is a monumentally stupid habit to pick up. Its bad enough that "protected by paint" bike lanes encourage this habit - the "protected by paint with a prize at the end" is even worse.


Watching the Danger Live on YouTube

The second thing the bike box does is allow the cyclist to get to the left hand side of the lane "in the safety of the bike box" - which is to say, "protected" by the paint of the vehicle stop line. Picking up the Bike Box Youtube in the third example, we can see how effectively the main vehicle stop line protects the bike box from incursion by motorists - as in, not at all.

At 1:00 into this clip is a safe passing on the right - because the car is turning left. But in a single share traffic lane, if the left turning car is in the left part of the lane, the cyclist can pass just as safely without requiring a bike lane at all.

At 1:15 into this clip, and then again at 1:40, we see the key to designing Bike Boxes as if we want cyclists to live.

In the first case (1:15), a cyclists could have used the bike lane to try to sneak around the car to get into the bike box to get in front to prepare for their left turn. But then, what if the signal changes "mid-sneak"? Either they try to get the car a left hook - and the cyclist of course loses whether they are receiving or delivering a right or left hook - or they have to wait until traffic is clear to merge left. Safer, and worst-case-quicker, to simply merge left behind the car and wait to turn left.

Indeed, lots of cyclists sneaking around the right to get in front of cars for left turns, and sometimes getting caught, could well encourage drivers to encroach on the bike box to prevent it.

In the second case (1:40), a cyclist arrives at the bike box, stopping on the bike indicator to trigger the signal. A car pulls in behind, and then a cyclist pulls in behind the car - instead of trying to sneak unsafely into the bike box on the right hand side of the car.

So while the bike box is a death trap, an aware cyclist can easily avoid the trap. For the expert cyclist, who uses it optionally and when appropriate, it offers the convenience of being able to trip the traffic signal. On the other hand, an inexperienced or confused cyclist is more likely to be killed.

Surely a bike box that is less likely to kill the inexpert cyclist can be designed?


Painting a Safer Bike Box

The idea of using the bike box to enter from the right and then get positioned for a left hand turn is a clear kill-the-cyclist idea. Consider the example from John Allen, pictured to the right. The bike box in the top right, which is already occupied, is not likely to have a car seeing a new green and driving through a cyclist lining up to turn left. The bike box in the bottom left, though, which is empty, is more inviting for a cyclist to go around right to get left - and sooner or later, there will be a car that is looking up to see green and then down to see the cyclist too late.

So that is the first thing to get rid of. That does not mean the bike box should not exist on the left hand side. It is safe for a cyclist who has already merged left to occupy that slot waiting for the light. Its just encouraging death or injury to try to sneak in "over the top" of traffic waiting on the light.

This means, of course, that there should be two boxes - with the space between barred to cyclists.

If there is a "protected by paint" bike lane, the solid line should not extend to the box. Instead, left turning cycle traffic should be warned to merge left safely for a left turn, and then straight through traffic warned to merge into the traffic lane to pass through the intersection. Before the start of the bike box, a cycle lane should be marked "right turn only" - and only of there is a cycle lane to turn directly into - because the only time it is even plausibly safe to pass cars on the right is if turning right inside of the traffic lane.

Indeed, in a "turn right on red with caution" state like here in Ohio, there is no need for a traffic indicator in that case - a right turn only bike lane turning into the a bike lane is a cyclist that can look out for crossing cyclists heading to the bike lane. Its only the through and left turn cyclist who needs the signal tripped.

So, that's my idea of a better bike box. It does not encourage habits likely to get novice cyclists killed before they have a chance to become experienced cyclists. It retains the advantage of having a dedicated cycle trip detector. It supports left turning cyclists positioning themselves so through motor traffic can pass them safely to their right. And it allows marking between the left and through bike boxes that indicates far more clearly to the driver not to encroach on the box.

REM: Stand Thing about Direction
 : : :Wonder Why You Haven't Before

Friday Hours of Action against Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp

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 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.

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: 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.

Episode 5: 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 6: 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 than originally expected 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 Distributer

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.

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.

Hulu.com Exclusive: Bleach


The List

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

11 Eyes ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/227/vid_2efe0de4c3624cf59de17cbd5950b399.flv
11 Eyes ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/178/vid_b959ed011b8442a585e9f4d7a7a68622.flv
Armed Librarians: The Book of Bantorra ep-5 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/140/vid_952b79e569a54cd69c6c00078280e33d.flv
Armed Librarians: The book of Bantorra ep-3 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/199/vid_5c4dd294f806414da629d5e93295bc92.flv
Asura Cryin' ep-12 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/114/vid_a9ade428de84445b9c83f9ced317409e.flv
Asura Cryin' ep-11 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/176/vid_bbba16750165472d925628206e0d17c7.flv
Asura Cryin' ep-10 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/148/vid_59b9ec299ac24983a9a5c8263b7c19eb.flv
Asura Cryin' ep-9 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/140/vid_b33490ed48e14b9db8be41e3f7e6e0f7.flv
Asura Cryin' ep-6 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/123/vid_b2a0db2bdb23478688852f72053a5ae1.flv
Asura Cryin' ep-5 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/234/vid_15a9efe835794c4d8a97a7d3664ec0a6.flv
Asura Cryin' ep-4 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/124/vid_d5b01cc47243425a9a5b0a4cb3637550.flv
Asura Cryin' ep-3 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/167/vid_6d492fdd5f5d4c8da0d88f636c370352.flv
Asura Cryin' ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/98/vid_1729385c8f864416a3cfae177cf58855.flv
Asura Cryin' ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/124/vid_3622c8db50264463bdc2179195ac5c15.flv
Code Geass 24 and FINAL http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/25/vid_17b938a32bb4b54e49b04e584f00fb1e.flv
Code Geass ep-22 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/33/vid_142b9ab034b342a5affea9fe9fa3b039.flv
Code Geass ep-21 http://cache02-videos02.myspacecdn.com/71/vid_a49dff28a91a4b0d811dddc38c6c2bc4.flv
Code Geass ep-17 http://cache02-videos02.myspacecdn.com/94/vid_2380a32f12bb4e5db5b171e2b01d67e8.flv
Code Geass ep-15 http://cache02-videos02.myspacecdn.com/65/vid_753ac55a47824092a692f215d333cdf2.flv
Code Geass ep-7 http://cache02-videos02.myspacecdn.com/67/vid_2f046b61bcde4971b5b155a7f19efc77.flv
Code Geass ep-3 http://cache02-videos02.myspacecdn.com/81/vid_b1b14079297a4b0ca4996399133fd78f.flv
Code Geass ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/26/vid_3cb84c50773ee6e7c8613443755a96e5.flv
Code Geass ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/22/vid_afe26aa5e49fe5cb77fbef25eac14e4f.flv
Fairy Tail ep-3 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/176/vid_a1fa4b76325b44dcbe611390159d480f.flv
Fairy Tail ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/211/vid_1d948466bef443769e32331e58c5b30f.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-24 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/238/vid_ea68368edccc46b081e762d29fcd10b6.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-23 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/224/vid_5d422caa1af7459d9e37f22146ea488e.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-22 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/135/vid_10c157b8c9a340e697538f062cc89c37.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-21 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/113/vid_1fe1292c865a49ad95360aec73f8cc95.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-20 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/123/vid_6f5db1b0f1184cf4895844a3cbb6bc17.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-19 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/225/vid_2a975e75dab44baa885c74252914fbfe.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-18 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/169/vid_081ddd07f13d46c58c24d6b2f0fdafd8.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-17 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/231/vid_09722c4f66be4dbe9c0390fe469d76d8.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-16 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/101/vid_ddf85e2ce3fa4d9cbcc30915d84ed94a.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-15 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/131/vid_eadb43798b5248ff9d3f99481e6518f2.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-14 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/174/vid_872b32d812734bd696e0cadadb99b437.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-13 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/120/vid_3cd0836ebcee4897a7a43c9a88cce3cc.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-12.5 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/120/vid_3cd0836ebcee4897a7a43c9a88cce3cc.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-12 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/151/vid_b9a5e14d42264dbbb4e30c5ee5788800.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-11 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/162/vid_7a3ec361d7f648d0b5a8c3471bad8e89.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-10 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/222/vid_9993162cad574bd79e939a5677d95af3.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-9 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/205/vid_fa33bc7732c24913b0616fad86600c66.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-8 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/118/vid_f690e391e5894ff5b2a27f3e8cbb2620.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-7 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/138/vid_7932dda66ce2432ca14e7626be83ac6e.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-6 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/228/vid_d5eacebc023a4042812565202393dd57.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-5 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/139/vid_9cb9e5f430264c4290104c212a2b390b.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-4 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/111/vid_2161ec5690a5438c9399f9353c9e8a47.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-3 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/122/vid_cf8b6f72fa86492999c75d828e4e28ab.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/122/vid_5d0ef0e55c60478b8073ceb2bc796ea9.flv
Hanasakeru Seishounen ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/193/vid_fb9058c029ab4fa6b09c04b9b35bc006.flv
Letter Bee ep-5 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/129/vid_847e798312c142768498a99f93721ded.flv
Letter Bee ep-4 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/119/vid_83c2cc0abd8d4741b43cb52c769476ba.flv
Letter Bee ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/183/vid_507c7882740444f1894c8ae0e92f9926.flv
Miracle Train ep-4 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/169/vid_256fb5a9a5984522bf3da5fbe2e99c7f.flv
Miracle Train ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/109/vid_cb657535b6064b5293ff1afefb23e88d.flv
Miracle Train ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/157/vid_6d10b9f21aa746268ecca532ba8c3da7.flv
Natsu no Arashi! Akinaichuu ep-4 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/106/vid_3957b166e462410e9515a1ab76db1de4.flv
Natsu no Arashi! Akinai-chuu ep-3 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/206/vid_7544b717cc8448b3a516496424a1c94c.flv
Natsu no Arashi! Akinaichuu S2 ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/212/vid_1ebf88396b0046b0a49ab668c89e5fcf.flv
Natsu no Arashi! Akinaichuu S2 ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/146/vid_23ca8118ea554bda953ba5f5aa0fadc7.flv
Hayate the Combat Butler ep-50 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/201/vid_0a6441434a51449bb26cd8f05fb7c618 .flv \ target
Hayate the Combat Butler ep-46 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/105/vid_c5059ee28f454439bab8562eb8dfec12 .flv \ target
Hayate the Combat Butler ep-40 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/191/vid_74ca0d0dafbb4a9bade9e3beee330ce4 .flv \ target
Nogizara Haruka no Himitsu: Purezza ep-4 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/205/vid_6a329f9cd75b4bf1aa759eb2503a250f.flv
Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu: Purezza ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/218/vid_d8a48630580647acbc63e2a95a688fc4.flv \ CR rip
Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu: Purezza ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/179/vid_9b99d3ec6e9d477dbd905650743fca7e.flv
Sasameki Koto ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/208/vid_6193fbfcdd4f4ac69cab07016c8f437d.flv
Sasameki Koto ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/193/vid_7c72339c2f284d8eb4ce8693911dd445.flv
Shugo Chara Party! ep-5http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/166/vid_9d623017769449bd91789fc28f8ebb69.flv \ 04112009
Shugo Chara Party! ep-4 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/161/vid_1153f7fd40774e4681c9a7997d6e71be.flv
Shugo Chara Party! ep-3 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/108/vid_18ca20ed13104eb491277a890eaa7843.flv
Shugo Chara Party! ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/110/vid_f3bdc922eb5146af8a0075c82496d151.flv
Shugo Chara Party! ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/125/vid_1b35b9c2ca7243099b151965da33b5f7.flv
Sora no Otoshimono ep-5 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/102/vid_f2ffa3723810474e8c0c0ee3c1e09039.flv \ 04112009
Sora no Otoshimono ep-5 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/102/vid_26e315027aec4183a927c39cc21392dd.flv \ 04112009
Sora no Otoshimono ep-4 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/98/vid_546c54e17a044fafa9a2a5e465b07d53.flv
Sora no Otoshimono ep-3 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/169/vid_99a4a57fc18f4a3499bfcfd149add988.flv
Sora no Otoshimono ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/218/vid_ba3f5089ad20400bbc49984dcc3c98d2.flv
Sora no Otoshimono ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/113/vid_0d5d0533dd604889824e15de97bbc54e.flv
White Album 2nd Season ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/151/vid_f5a74443bc40454dab17cd348332b6c7.flv
White Album 2nd Season ep-1 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/199/vid_2ae06ddcd4c14af0b052194bf9a2655b.flv
Aoi Hana ep-6 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/164/vid_4a22a73cc538412eba5a20c182f8a1b8.flv
Aoi Hana ep-5 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/175/vid_2155f5b765b444ee83dd86ba848ab0de.flv
Aoi Hana ep-4 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/178/vid_103716c4eb28416bb59233d4dfd7e169.flv
Aoi Hana ep-3 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/98/vid_b5d99be896254c6e9c19e3f79bb0f509.flv
Aoi Hana ep-2 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/226/vid_5266410a9f8145deaec2a513140269ba.flv
Bleach ep-243 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/162/vid_d6923be81f1344e4954abd934311a00a.flv
Bleach ep-242 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/226/vid_9cbefb100f2241e18228e114f480a071.flv
Bleach ep-240 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/232/vid_480ea5e171ed4f81ae915fff15f17f08.flv
Bleach ep-239 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/116/vid_bd4914c2358d4d2cb9e219a06c553b41.flv
Bleach ep-238 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/187/vid_118eed99828d4d1f96f6d21b8279036c.flv
Bleach ep-236 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/115/vid_4a560038a9244460a085807e7ce8f6ed.flv
Bleach ep-235 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/133/vid_cfde19c5a02d498d98695176d9bf4af4.flv
Bleach ep-234 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/149/vid_7760432a5dd24f4f9afe495182007176.flv
Bleach ep-233 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/168/vid_6c8aada396074e458be888f875c060a1.flv
Bleach ep-232 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/116/vid_f6cead8c4b89466f82b9f7fcf3697848.flv
Bleach ep-230 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/128/vid_df9988af5e6b41d981ec40d4baad3519.flv
Bleach ep-228 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/172/vid_2ad11e7ae88943e2b5f04c283e4f9ca7.flv
Bleach ep-227 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/224/vid_6605407d46cb4ecaad3faad923577e97.flv
Bleach ep-226 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/141/vid_c3c5c9acc901471c9d2f5661bacff8c1.flv
Bleach ep-225 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/229/vid_1397aed7ed9a40a2937e8679fe26ad50.flv
Bleach ep-224 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/232/vid_5cc58ce4f0ac4891ae564edb7f0a6d8e.flv
Bleach ep-223 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/118/vid_f556fa2d92ea4da7b0c0fb280a9f3672.flv
Bleach ep-221 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/187/vid_691973e1a13c4d2cb2bd9ca6d96ac123.flv
Bleach ep-219 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/183/vid_7d733b74299d4cd9954e47eab269574a.flv
Bleach ep-214 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/195/vid_ebe8d8fef1b840e0a1199876d0b843b4.flv
Bleach ep-213 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/116/vid_67b4d67d0b9548089bb161adb5ec6893.flv
Bleach ep-212 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/70/vid_943d238d32ce4b8a8d9e8f49ed8e9f5d.flv
Bleach ep-211 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/36/vid_be69947974084ba7aa9b73c8c22f5dce.flv
Bleach ep-210 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/66/vid_6445b8367938439c8c61551e177975f2.flv
Bleach ep-209 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/96/vid_ad7dbd00a66749e4b331a6dfb2fb6750.flv
Bleach ep-207 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/16/vid_45b208cfdf7742b7982a5b16a0674288.flv
Bleach 191 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/23/vid_1aecd6374efe48a62278d7b115fb18f6.flv
Bleach 154 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/38/vid_28b1718e617bb35830b67791c7610071.flv
Bleach 148 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/49/vid_55ec0640845c4fe18c27eb25f7b04e3b.flv
Bleach 141 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/127/vid_a0df1a765fec45ea94dc314ac26b6818.flv
Bleach 113 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/70/vid_fe94babec0bf44e5b394ba3fa36f36b0.flv
Bleach 110 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/70/vid_fe94babec0bf44e5b394ba3fa36f36b0.flv
Bleach 107 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/72/vid_32b82a4be6764da9a4f5ddb855ae0b82.flv
Bleach 55 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/193/vid_3ca8b898559f4e8590c2caad98163209.flv
Bleach 50 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/214/vid_bdf4994e092f4ba285c9cd736d922051.flv
Bleach 01 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/212/vid_0988580aba55490480947406ab5aed6d.flv
Naruto Shippuden 132 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/186/vid_606beda237af41c0baab9a4e806a0ca0.flv
Naruto Shippuden 128 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/235/vid_6886f579aff547f9b6e35b371ab05404.flv
Naruto Shippuden 127 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/156/vid_2cc80908653e4f018ec08a15ad7a79d0.flv
Naruto Shippuden 125 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/238/vid_ec0a6e3bf58d46ef84b3cda028d4b609.flv
Naruto Shippuden 86-87 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/72/vid_effc15cc9a4c4fb39c354e767b80283b.flv
Naruto Shippuden 85 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/11/vid_ee83941d58af46f798584d6280fe78de.flv
Naruto Shippuden 12 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/183/vid_0fc408fb9d674889ada0573a4bfa47f4.flv
Naruto Shippuden 6-7 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/66/vid_d3642749f87941cf852e58ad029683fc.flv
Naruto ep-5 http://cache01-videos02.myspacecdn.com/48/vid_96d1b87f608b420e8fb088d8430e2488.flv

The Teaspoon Model Versus Rupert Murdoch's Pirate Support Base

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.

Tonight, I consider an experiment on the Teaspoon Model in action.



The Sunshine Experiment

What I did at the beginning of the week was to send an email for comment to NBC/Universal and Disney/ABC on whether they had any comment on the hosting of bootleg streams by FoxNews servers (specifically, MySpaceCDN and MySpace domains) in competition with legit streams from Hulu.com, their joint venture with NewsCorp:

Dear Disney and NBC/Universal,

I am sure that you are aware that there are severa reports of Hulu.com joint venture partner executives saying that Hulu.com will be forced to move to a paid content model.

As an economist engaged in research in the New Media Economy, I have been looking at the competition with legitimate streaming sites from bootleg streaming sites. These sites rely on off-site free hosts for their bootleg streams. My research of these hosts indicate that they collect stream links from anywhere they can find them, but that when videos are taken down, they upload videos to their preferred free video hosting site.

I was surprised to find that the preferred free video hosting site for these uploads at the bootleg site that I am data-mining for their streams is the MySpaceCDN servers, registered by 20th Century Fox, a subsidiary of NewsCorp, a joint venture partner for Hulu.com.

While I am sure that the administration of the MySpace servers takes down videos on receiving a DMCA notice, they do not appear to act on other forms of information to remove bootleg material competing against Hulu.com.

My working hypothesis is that in their business model, being pro-active in identifying and removing bootleg media streams in competition against Hulu.com is not worth the trouble, as it costs resources while the fact that MySpace is less aggressive in identifying and removing bootlegs than YouTube and Veoh attracts traffic to MySpace that might otherwise be at risk of moving to FaceBook.

However, I cannot find any public comment by their joint venture partners, Disney and NBC/Universal in particular, on the apparent contradiction of Hulu.com moving to a paid content model while one of the joint venture partners appears to have a tolerant approach to bootleg material streamed freely in competition with Hulu.com.

I include below the links to bootleg streams in competitition with the Hulu.com streaming shows "Naruto Shippuden" and "Bleach". You will note that these are two of the four most popular streams in the:
http://www.hulu.com/channels/Animation-and-Cartoons/Anime
channel. In my research, I am focusing on Anime as the anime fanbase have been early adopters of video media technologies from the 1980's and the first fan-subtitled animes circulating on VHS tape.

I previously brought some of the streams hosted at MySpaceCDN servers to the attention of the registered owners of these servers, to no effect. By contrast, a number of the Veoh.com links that this free streaming site links to have been removed in this past two weeks.

You can confirm for yourselves that the MySpaceCDN servers and other MySpace have in the past year become the dominant streaming source for both of these series, taking over from an earlier reliance primarily on video.google.com, and combined with a pattern of filling in for earlier individual shows that have been taken down at other streaming sites.

Note that the bootleg streaming site in received an order to Cease and Desist linking to bootleg FUNimation streams, or else there would be far more Hulu.com series represented at this site. I also include samples of series streamed from the legitimate streaming site "Crunchyroll", including both series currently airing in Japan and being simulcast at Crunchyroll, as well as examples from their back catalog.

I also include two examples of less popular Hulu.com series that are primarily hosted elsewhere.

Yours,

The Sunshine element was that I cc'd the email to the ownership and administration email of the MySpaceCDN domain as well as the various Violations, Support and DCMA email addresses I could glean of free video streaming hosts providing the bulk of the streaming that the bootleg anime streaming group relies upon.

And of course, the balance of the email was a list of over 580 links to bootleg anime streams. Less than a week later, 368 of those streams are no longer live.


The Video Streaming White Hats

What I found remarkable was that many of these video streaming hosts shut down almost all the clips in the list. And while I have not received a single email in response, there are a number of indications that this was in response to receipt of the email - for example, videos added after I compiled the original list are not taken down, or a link in a series accidentally omitted remaining live while all the surrounding videos that appears in the stream are taken down.

From the perspective of a small niche streaming site, directing a part of its narrow margins to paying license fees to the creators of the work, these are the real "white hats" - streaming sites that are pro-active about taking out the garbage, so that there is no need to go through the process of issuing Cease and Desist orders. If the four hosts in the White Hat Honor Roll continue to behave in this way, as small but determined fan support group could quickly teach bootleg anime leech sites to not even bother with any videos appearing on these sites:

• Veoh.com: 48 streams in the list, all 48 removed, for a 100% hit rate
• Imeem.com: 76 streams in the list, 75 streams removed, for a 99% hit rate
• Megavideo.com: 71 streams in the list, 60 streams removed - and of the remaining 11, 9 are directed to a domain that appears to be licensed to stream the material, for a 97% hit rate
• YouTube.com: 19 streams in the list, 16 down and 4 remaining up, for an 84% hit rate. For YouTube, all of the streams remaining up were from a single series. Given the attention that YouTube receives as the one-time Bootleg Video Central, this might be just the turnover that occurs with YouTube streams. On the other hand, with their automated video fingerprinting system, it may reflect the video producers that have signed in to have their content protected.
• Honorable Mention: Broadcaster.com had 17 streams in list, and I recorded 15 streams as unavailable. However, as this site comes up as "presently unavailable", the question is whether those other two streams are streaming from Broadcaster.com, or were instead already replaced by other streams between the time I harvested the links and the time I checked which episodes were still streaming.

The Hit and Miss Parade

However, there is also a substantial Hit and Miss parade, where a substantial number of the streams have been taken down, but a substantial number remain up, which may well indicate that the site is receiving official C&D notices from the rights holders. Some look like it lines up with the list of individual series, so that the rights holder may have been forwarded the list - others are in a more random pattern.

The Hit and Miss Parade includes:

• The MySpace.com domain itself had only 21 streams in the list, with 14 down and 7 remaining up, for a hit rate of 67%
  
• MySpaceCDN.com: 241 streams in the list, with 110 streams removed and 131 streams still up. However, of the 110 streams removed, 43 have special circumstances - for instance the streaming page was in the process of being updated, so it may have been an stream that was already down. Of the 191 streams with no special notes, 67 were removed and 122 remain up, a hit rate of 35%
  
• Guba.Com was very lightly used, of only 7 streams, 4 are down and 3 remain up, for a 58% hit rate

The Black Hats

The Black Hats are the sites that showed no turnover of files whatsoever. These are the sites that a fan-based Teaspoon Brigade will have to be collecting stream links and forwarding the streams to the rights holder for batch Cease and Desist orders to halt streaming of bootleg material:

• LiveVideo.com: 30 streams in the list, all 30 remain up, for a 0% hit rate. It should be noted that LiveVideo was omitted from the original cc list and was notified in a separate communication. However, while LiveVideo is one of the few sites that claim to accept communication regarding copyright violations from people other than the copyright holders, there is not yet any evidence that it acts on that information.
• Google.com: 85 streams in the list, 14 now down, 71 still up for a hit rate of 16% - and the streams still up include an extensive portion of the back-catalog of Naruto Shippuden, the most popular series streaming at Hulu.com. Google.com was the only recipient of a cc' that responded - with a form letter response regarding the information required for a formal copyright complaint, indicating that they glanced at the email and put it into the form-letter queue.
• SevenLoad.com: with only 8 streams in the list, this is either a host that gets around to scrubbing bootlegs eventually, or simply not a preferred host for the bootleg anime streaming site providing the information, but of those 8, only 2 went down, with 6 still up, for a hit rate of 25%.

Moving Forward

One thing that is clear is that a 100% hit rate is by no means necessary in order for the Teaspoon Model to work in this particular shadowing fringe lying outside the US Anime market.

This is one key difference between this area and peer-to-peer downloading. With peer-to-peer downloading, if some well-organized crackdown was to miss a single potential seed, once the existence of that seed would made public, the community of those interested in the material would quickly re-create the copies.

With the leech bootleg streaming sites, what they offer is the organization and easy access to a stream from some central streaming site - if the stream is taken down, their only recourse is to either find another copy or to upload a copy of their own. But if they find another existing copy, that only helps hunt down the extant copies on streaming sites around the net, while far more time and effort is required to upload a new copy then is required to note the link address and report that information to the rights holder and streaming host.


The Puzzle Regarding MySpaceCDN - and One Possible Answer

It is still a puzzle that MySpaceCDN is not in the ranks of the White Hats. Indeed, if MySpaceCDN was to simply take down the bootleg streaming it does competing against Hulu.com, a NewsCorp Joint Venture, it would have shown a hit rate above 80%.

In Is Rupert Murdoch Picking His Partner's Pockets ..., I adopted the working hypothesis that the enterprises in Ol' Rupert's media empire are just Old Media Dinosaurs that just are incapable of reacting at the pace required to keep up in a field like this.

However, recent news will likely add fuel to the fire of the "Pickpocket" hypothesis. And that is that a lack of hits at MySpace is likely costing MySpace on the order of $100m. See, the purchase of MySpace was financed at a profit with an exclusive contract with google - except there were guarantees required MySpace's hit traffic:

MySpace Traffic Drop Costs News Corp About $100 Million, By Eliot Van Buskirk, November 5, 2009
The MySpace social media network’s traffic has dropped so much that it will fail to satisfy a minimum traffic level crucial to parent company News Corp’s three-year $900 million advertising deal with Google, inked in 2006, that made Google the exclusive search advertiser on MySpace — then the world’s most popular social network.

News Corp. executives bandied about three different estimates of how much of the Google’s $900 million MySpace will not take in, due to the shortfall, but a consensus emerged that the penalty will be in the neighborhood of $100 million.

As the Financial Times points out, this Google ad deal covered News Corp.’s estimated $580 million purchase of MySpace. The site’s failure to provide the deal’s minimum traffic level is bad news for News Corp., which otherwise reported a generally positive outlook due to its movie studio and cable channels, which currently generate 85 percent of the company’s revenue.
...

Under the PickPocket hypothesis, MySpaceCDN servers are not taking the aggressive, pro-active attitude to "taking out the trash", because it does not want to alienate users in the fight for market share with FaceBook. The story from Wired, however, casts a different light on the issue - the conflict between long-term, strategic goals and short-term revenue.

After all, MySpace has conceded defeat in the market space it once dominated, and is trying to leverage an advantage it build up for another market space:

Rather than compete against those social networking heavyweights, MySpace intends to double down on what has always been a core strength: the millions of artist pages on the site, which dwarfs the catalog of other music services, because it includes so many unsigned (and, for that matter, signed) bands. MySpace’s new strategy, already known before the earnings call, will be to realign the site as an entertainment destination rather than a place where people keep up with friends and family.

If the strategy works, it will likely involve MySpace leveraging video in addition to music. MySpace Video currently boasts over 20,000 music videos, television shows and other videos, but faces entrenched competition from YouTube that could be even fiercer than Facebook and Twitter are on the social networking side

In the short term, being more passive about copyright protection than YouTube and the main second tier video streaming sites will drive a larger number of hits in the direction of MySpace, reducing the penalty it faces in its advertising contract with google.

However, it is clearly not in NewsCorp's long term interest to encourage the proliferation of bootleg videos on its site. One the one hand, bootleg videos cannot attract the mainstream video ad-streaming that, at the very least, pays the web serving and video streaming bills for a video streaming site, so that whatever other income it attracts does not have to cover those basic operating costs. With MySpace's long term strategic direction, they need to encourage the creators of original work to use MySpace to publicize themselves - they certainly do not need to be streaming bootleg anime on behalf of leach sites where a link to MySpace does not even appear.

Indeed, if the MySpaceCDN servers were in the hands of a media empire that was not such an Old Media Dinosaur, anybootleg anime that it learned off streaming in competition against its own joint venture would be replaced with a short trailer advertising the legitimate stream on site - and a bootleg that was not streamed at the joint venture would be replaced by a trailer for MySpace as a video and music entertainment stop - an a Google link to search for legitimate streams and other legitimate sources of the anime title, to make Google happier with MySpace.

I am still skeptical that NewsCorp is deliberately adopting a passive attitude toward cleaning up the trash at MySpaceCDN, putting its financial interests in MySpace traffic ahead of the financial interest of its Joint Venture with NBC/Universal and Diensy/ABC - but the news that a shortfall of MySpace hits is costing Rupert $100m certainly does add to the plausibility of the alternative working hypothesis.

The candy store paupers lie to the share holders
They're crossing their fingers they pay the truth makers
The balance sheet is breaking up the sky
So I'm caught at the junction still waiting for medicine
The sweat of my brow keeps on feeding the engine
Hope the crumbs in my pocket can keep me for another night
And if the blue sky mining company won't come to my rescue
If the sugar refining company won't save me
Who's gonna save me?

Is Rupert Murdoch Picking His Partner's Pockets ...

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

Burning the Midnight Oil for Breaking the Silicon Cage
In Orange 5pm Wednesday, EST

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.

Now, 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.
__________________

Because rather than being serious in our antagonism with Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp, rather than owning our antagonism, rather than recognizing that sometimes, some people are just committed to opposing almost everything you are committed to supporting and so much be attacked whenever they present a target of opportunity...

... it may well be that many members of the "progressive blogosphere" are only comfortable in acting when they have been manipulated into outrage. If someone else can push our buttons, and tick us off, then we can join in expressing outrage. If, on the other hand, we have to pursue our revenge against Rupert Murdoch's media empire with cold calculation, that's not the same. And, no, its not the same - it would be an indication that we are serious about taking power.

Because this is an issue that on its own merits is not likely to be a big button pusher in the progressive blogosphere. The eternal online temptation to sneer is too strong, and the opportunity to land a punch on the enemy is lost in the joy of being smugly superior to the line of the attack.


The Line of Attack

Because the line of the attack is US translations of Japanese anime. US distribution of bootleg anime has long been on the bleeding edge of the New Media economy, with VHS tape bootlegs of fan-subtitled Japanese anime series circulating in the 80's, early adoption of computer digital video in the 90's, and early adoption and a strong presence in peer-to-peer networked file sharing.

This was a fringe of the anime audience that the industry ignored in the US growth period of the 90's and early part of this decade. However, an industry that had become increasingly reliant on US licensing fees, with US sales reaching a peak of around $500m earlier in this decade, has been hit hard in the second half of this decade. The distribution of bootlegs through free streaming sites has cut growing swathes of the fanbase out of the audience for licensed work, and US sales have slumped to a figure closer to $350m.

Particularly hard hit have been the higher end US distributors that dub Japanese anime with US voice actors - considered essential for packaging a series for US broadcast, but representing a substantial fixed cost for a US distributor to take on with no guarantee of recouping the cost from increased sales. In the past few years, one long time US distributor, Central Park Media, has gone bankrupt, and another, ADV, restructured as Section 23 Films and spun off its dubbing division into a separate company.

OK, so what does this have to do with Rupert Murdoch?

One of the ways that the anime industry has been trying to cope with the rapid distribution of bootleg fansubs on streaming sites has been to make legitimate licensed streams available to fans, in a mix of ad and subscriber supported business models. Examples include Joost, with over 30 anime series available, and Crunchyroll, with over 100.

But of course, legitimate sites can only stream what they can license, while the bootleg streamers can stream anything they can find available on a free video stream host site. For example, Hulu.com focuses entirely on North American rights, and has a running fight with services that allow overseas access via US-based Internet addresses, while Crunchyroll.com faces constant irritation from overseas members when a show they want to watch is not available for streaming to their country.

And the bootleg streamers can survive on the miniscule revenues of web ads and donations, because they contribute nothing back to the creative artists, contribute nothing back to the "fansub" groups that translate and subtitle works as a community activity, and indeed do not actually do the streaming of the material itself.

The flipside of that, however, is that the bootleg streamers can only exist due to the tolerance of their activity by the free video stream sites or due to the ineffectiveness of enforcement efforts.

Which is what raises the question in the title: is Rupert Murdoch's MySpace video streaming tolerating bootleg anime streams, in order to attract more users in their ongoing fight with FaceBook (note if you click through to [http://www.joost.com/epg/us/shows/animation/anime/ Joost], you can sign in via Facebook) ... or is NewsCorp just an Old Media Dinosaur that is incapable of being fast enough on its feet to cope?

Because, as I began to document last week, and finished working out just this last weekend, Rupert Murdoch's MySpace servers, owned by 20th Century FOX, are the Pirate Support Base of preference of the particular bootleg streaming source that I have been datamining for stream host information.

In particular, looking at all series on the site that are available in a licensed free stream at either Hulu.com, Crunchyroll.com, or the AnimeNewsNetwork.com, the count of links as of 30-10-2009 by host server is:

• MySpaceCDN.com: 461, MySpace.com: 47, Total: 508
  
• imeem.com: 100
  
• google.com: 85
  
• megavideo.com: 81
  
• Source Hidden behind Local Link: 47
  
• LiveVideo.com: 39
  
• Veoh.com: 22
  
• YouTube.com: 18
  
• SevenLoad.com: 14
  
• TwitVid.com: 1
  
• Zoopy.com: 1
  

So in one part of his "trying to into the New Media Economy" strategy for his media empire, it turns out that Rupert Murdoch's MySpace is a major free streaming hosts for bootleg anime. Those in turn undermine the efforts of production houses and US distributors to provide US access to content shortly after Japanese airtime, while providing some income stream to keep the creative artists, producers, and translaters employed.

There is nothing that can be done to stop peer-to-peer file sharing, and so the market for DVD's is the market for people who want the DVD's. That genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back in. But clearly, not everyone wants to or can work out where to download bootlegs, or how to get them playing on their system - that is why the bootleg streaming sites exist and attract an audience. There are those who prefers the simplicity of just browsing to a site and watching the show.

And that is the potential audience that Rupert Murdoch's MySpace is helping to divert away from the legitimate streaming sites.


The Pick-Pocket Thesis

One of Rupert's other ventures in trying to buy his way into the New Media Economy is Hulu.com, a free streaming joint venture between NewsCorp, NBC/Universal and Disney/ABC (there may be others - I'll be happy if you can add to that list of joint venture partners in the comments).

Which is where it gets weird, because when you look at the top four shows on Hulu.com by popularity, the list is topped by Naruto Shippuden - also available at Joost.com and Crunchyroll - with "Bleach" at number four. Hulu.com seems to be the sole source for legit streams of "Bleach".

Bleach is important for the bootleg streaming sites as well - in one it features as one of three series with direct links provided at the very top of every page.

And it is argued in some quarters that Hulu.com definitely needs more audience if it is going to be a successful venture. The Silicon Valley Insider at The Business Insider:

We have been skeptical that Hulu will receive enough of a revenue cut from its content and distribution partners to cover what we believe is a high cost structure. After conducting more research, we remain skeptical. It is not impossible that Hulu's model will work, but we continue to think it will be challenging for the company to turn a profit and build a sustainable business.

And there may be a fight over the business model brewing between NewsCorp on one side, and NBC/Universal and Disney/ABC on the other:

Here’s the skinny: A story on B&C’s Web site says Carey “hopes that it will move to a subscription model,” While Entertainment Weekly said Carey firmly stated the site would start charging in 2010. Whatever really happened, it was enough for a Hulu spokesperson to speak up — which hasn’t happened in the past over this issue — pouring cold water on the paid idea, at least for now:

Hulu’s mission has always been to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium, professionally produced content. We continue to believe that the ad-supported free service is the one that resonates with the largest group of users and any possible new business models would serve to complement our existing offering. There are no details or timelines to share regarding our future product roadmap.

So, if Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp are trying to push Hulu.com into some form of subscriber model, and at the same time they are faced with the power-law distribution of social networks in their fight for market share against Facebook, the "Pickpocket" thesis is:

• NewsCorp tolerates bootleg video except when required by law to act, because it serves their interests, even if it undermines the interest of Hulu.com under its current business model.

After all, the argument would go, they are not entirely troubled by the prospect of that market model failing if they expect it to fail anyway. Why devote effort to protecting the market audience of a lost cause?


The Dinosaur Thesis

Only considering a single hypothesis leaves a risk of looking for confirming evidence and overlooking contradictory evidence. And there is, after all, a second hypothesis that should be considered.

Suppose NewsCorp is simply an Old Media Dinosaur, is competing against itself through simple incompetence, which is just one more signal that it is doomed to fall as the oligopolistic market structures in both press and broadcast media that it was built upon are torn apart as we build the New Media Economy.

One of the tests of the "tolerance" scenario is whether any action is taken when information is passed on by someone other than the rights owner. The streaming host is legally required to act on a Cease and Desist order from the rights owner - but they are certainly permitted to investigate and take action no matter what their source of information is.

And so I have been passing my results on to the various streaming sites, to see what their reaction is. Many of the "minor sources" above react quite quickly. Indeed, if I had taken the count a week earlier, the count of Veoh.com clips would have been 50% higher, amd from my exploration yesterday and today, the count would be substantially lower again today.

Some sites show a splash screen that content was taken down due to copyright infringement. Others, such as Imeem.com, simply bring up the embedded video player with no content for it to stream.

The most interesting reaction is that of MegaVideo. Many of the MegaVideo videos have been replaced by a "copyright infringement" take-down notice. However, at least two bring up an entry portal into the iReel.com site - which appears to be a site for licensed streams of movies and shows, and which might indeed have a license to stream that particular show.

Exploration of the "Bleach" show, where Hulu.com has exclusive streaming rights, shows that some but not all of the MySpaceCDN streams have been taken down. In particular, those links referred to in an email to the site registration owner and administrator at the end of last week seemed to be in the process of being taken down - but while sites like Megavideo.com and Imeem.com have a reaction time of a day or two - the reaction time for MySpaceCDN.com seems to be more in the range of a week or two.

So, myself, I lean toward the "Dinosaur" thesis. Indeed, it would appear that few streaming hosts are as well placed to replace streams of bootleg anime with a pre-packaged stream that advertises the series availability on Hulu.com. At the very least, they can get rid of bootleg streams of episodes that they are hosting in competition against themselves in a timely manner. However, in practice, they are clearly slower in reacting than Veoh.com, Sevenload.com, Imeem.com and Megavideo.com - I had inadvertently omitted LiveVideo from the cc: list of the email I sent to NBC/Universal Disney/ABC, but I would not be surprised of LiveVideo.com is also quicker on their feet than NewsCorp.

They might defend themselves that I am using the wrong email addresses to contact them, but on the other hand I am just using publicly available registration, copyright violation, or Terms and Conditions violations contact addresses.

Still and all, they are, slowly, reacting. They just do not seem to have the ability to react as fast as the little mammals scurrying around their feet.


So, What Are We Supposed to Do About It

In the end, while anime fans might feel compelled to work out why NewsCorp is acting the way it does, the progressive blogosphere really does not. Whether they are one of the biggest Pirate Support Bases in the US streaming anime market because they are pursuing a dishonest game against their Hulu.com joint venture partners, or because they are simply not as competent at shutting down bootleg streams as their smaller, nimbler, New Media Economy rivals ...

... they still remain one of the biggest pirate support bases, which is a great big glaring contradiction with NewsCorp's aggressive and noisy public attacks on "copyright piracy". Indeed, Rupert Murdoch (note that the picture at the right is not from the event itself) has just recently lectured the Chinese on the subject:

"The embrace of the digital is as vital to China today as its decision 30 years ago to take its place in the global economy," he said. News Corp owns Dow Jones & Co., which publishes The Wall Street Journal. "Chinese media and entertainment companies have a remarkable opportunity to expand their international influence and revenues." But Mr Murdoch said "piracy will make it difficult for them to generate the profits at home that would fuel growth abroad."

... while he himself owns one of the biggest Pirate Support Bases for anime streaming in the Internet!

So the reason number one for the progressive blogosphere to make a big noise about it is simply that its a vulnerable point.

And if its publicized broadly enough, NewsCorp will have to take action to shut the Anime Pirate Support Base. If it is pushed hard enough to be picked up by any of the mess media, NewsCorp will have to come out denying that it is intentional, and declaring that they will take steps to shut down what they had no idea was happening.

After all, whether they are doing it because they are a Pickpocket or because they are an Old Media Dinosaur, they have to pretend to be a New Media Not-Pickpocket once the question is asked publicly enough.

But then there is the question - do they just shut down the streaming they are doing in competition with themselves? If they decisively defend their own streams, but do not take the same decisive action to stop infringing on the rights of Crunchyroll.com, Joost.com, or the AnimeNewsNetwork, then we have them on the hook for another kick of the story.

And then if we force them to take decisive action to shut down the Anime Pirate Support Base for all legitimate streaming anime - well, then we win. If the solution requires ongoing organized action by anime fans in defense of the modest income streams available from free streaming, as I suggested in The Teaspoon Model - that's for the mature segment of the anime fanbase to take on. The progressive blogosphere would declare victory and move on.

OK, now suppose that we raise a ruckus but not enough to make the Dinosaur move its feet. We still will have been on the right side of trying to defend the livelihoods of the creators, against the Digital Millenium Copyright Act which is of course biased toward the big media middlemen. And, indeed, whether we force Murdoch to act or not, any ammunition we can give to any of his enemies is a good thing. After all, much of the evil that Murdoch does is in the realm of propaganda, and if he does not change MySpace's status as a primary Anime Pirate Support Base, that is something to snipe at him with every time he sounds off on the issue of copyright.

And win or lose, working in coalition in support of the growth of a New Media Economy is a useful networking exercise. After all, these are people with skills that the blogosphere needs very badly when we hit the campaign trail. We have got an ocean of words, but to get through to more than 30% of the electorate, we need effective moving images with sound. And the fans of the section of the New Media Industry we would be coming to the aid of here - include numbers of people with effective image creation and video production skills.

Well, at least, if progressives are serious about pursuing power. If being "progressive" is about sitting on the sideline and complaining, not so much.

If you are interested in joining the fight, keep a watch out for the "PirateCorp" tag, do what you can to publicize the direct actions in the fight, and to push the story into the media.

And if you can come up with additional / better direct actions than the Friday download-a-thon, be sure to pipe up.

The rich get richer, the poor get the picture
The bombs never hit you when you're down so low
Some got pollution, some revolution
There must be some solution but I just don't know
The bosses want decisions, the workers need ambitions
There won't be no collisions when they move so slow
Nothing ever happens, nothing really matters
No one ever tells me so what am I to know

You wouldn't read about it, read about it
Just another incredible scene, there's no doubt about it

Sunday Train: High Speed Rail - The Recruiters

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Note This is a repeat of one of my train diaries from 2007 that I wish to add into the Sunday Train knowledge base. Unless there is major rail news in the next week, Sunday Train next week will be considering the limitations inherited by the recent SubsidyScope report on Amtrack subsidies that they inherited from an uncritical acceptance of the limitations of traditional mainstream marginalist economic theory.

The big knock against high speed rail is, of course, that it does not run door to door. This is, of course, why the passenger air transport market is such a strategic target ... it is an existing fuel-inefficient mode of transport where everyone travels as a pedestrian. And a well designed high speed rail system will deliver the target market among pedestrian travellers from as close or closer to their origin, and drop them off as close or closer to their destination.

But those are not the only passengers that HSR will be catering to. A term I have heard railfans use for this type of activity is "recruiting" patronage, so, after the fold, I step through some of the important current, and potential, recruiters.




Ubiquitious Marginal Recruiter: Da Car

People today in the US normally get to the airport by car, so the first reaction of most people in the US when an airport-substitute becomes available is going to be to drive there.

This means that substantial parking will need to be provided in the vicinity of any outer suburban HSR station, for traditional park-and-ride use of the station.

However, we should never look at a fuel-efficient mode of transport, decide a strategic core market, and then stop there! A substantial benefit of high speed rail is that it brings rail outside of the inner-metropolitan core and through the outer suburbs, where a high speed rail stop can act as a support to a wide range of pro-Energy-Independence local transport.

In the balance of this piece, I am going to assume that about half of the eighth-of-a-mile zone surrounding the HSR station entrances will be devoted to the car ... access, egress, and parking. Often this will be two-level parking with covered walkway access directly to the station, making it easier for the individual park-and-ride users to avoid getting killed by the other park-and-ride users as they access and egress the station parking.

Hopefully, as the mode share of private vehicle use declines over the next two decades, some of the space devoted for car parking can be recaptured for a more intrinsically useful purpose.

Core Recruiters

There are a number of established transport technologies ... though not all of them established in the United States in this particular role ... that are inclined to act as very effective recruiters for a High Speed Rail station, because HSR provides them with an effective complement for the local transport services that they provide.

The five that come to my mind are walking, bicycles, neighborhood electric vehicles, local buses, and local rail (of all sorts).


Core Recruiter: Shanks Mare


The first recruiter is the transport mode called "Registration 11" in Grenada and what by those running the railroads of Oz are mostly thinking of as "self loading freight" ... that is, pedestrians.

The appeal of pedestrians is that they are a core market. A very large number of the people who rely heavily on foot power to get around locally will have a strong preference for the train over any other form of longer distance travel ... so market penetration by the high speed rail service among pedestrians living in the vicinity of a high speed rail station will be very strong.

On the other hand, it would seem as if we could disregard pedestrians in outer suburbia, because nobody in outer suburbia lives within walking distance to anywhere ... ... well, at least, practically nobody (after all, a handful live in small towns that have been swallowed up by outer suburbia).

In urban settings in Oz, where more people are accustomed to walking a few blocks, the high intensity pedestrian recruiting range for a train station is taken to be about a quarter mile, with a lower intensity recruiting range of just over 0.6 of a mile (and, yes, I have done the conversion from metres for you).

A quarter mile radius gives an ideal circle of around 19% of a mile. At 640 acres per square mile, that is about 120 acres within the high intensity recruiting range. With half acre blocks, that's merely 240 households ... with area wasted on streets, less ... with one acre blocks, only 120.

As suggested in Retrofitting Outer Suburbia, the key step in building pedestrian traffic is in actually building places for those pedestrians to live.

Rezone the area around the rail station so that inside an eighth of a mile radius, half of it is mixed ground floor streetfront business, 2/3 floor townhouse residential. Rezone the balance of the quarter mile radius so that it is three story stacked townhouse residential. If a townhouse occupies an eighth of an acre, that is about 1,400 households in the quarter mile to eighth mile ring, surrounding about roughly 120 households in the eighth of a mile radius ... more than 1,500 households in an short walk to the HSR station.

Of course, the zoning does not create the buildings ... building pedestrian traffic will be an ongoing, incremental process, over ten to thirty years, once the zoning is in place, and as the price of energy continues to rise. But permit a suburban village to emerge around a high speed rail stop, and in the energy cost conditions we will be facing over the next twenty years, it will emerge.

It is important to ensure that access to the station is pedestrian friendly ... in part for the direct use of the station by local residents, and in part to maintain the connection between the station and the small commercial precinct surrounding it. This has to be built in from the ground up, and certainly warrants funding as an aspect of the station infrastructure itself.


Core Recruiter: The Bike


To get improved mode share for cycle-and-ride transport, there needs to be infrastructure support. As was discovered in the first bicycle boom at the turn of the last century, effective bicycle transportation requires paved roads ... dirt or gravel roads are not nearly as ineffective. Luckily, most of outer suburbia is equipped with a suitable network of bike paths, connecting to each household in the area ... these bike paths are called "streets". So the infrastructure is already in place.

Some cyclists on arriving at the station will bring their bike with them on the train. However, others will require parking, and a generous amount of both cycle-post parking and cycle lockers must be provided.

The greater range of the bicycle means that it can provide a useful supplement to pedestrian traffic, even if only a relatively small share of the population adopt it. Taking 5 times the pedestrian recruiting range as the core bicycle recruiting range gives a radius of 1.25 miles ... the ring from a quarter to one and a quarter miles is about 4.7 square miles, or 3000 acres. With half acre blocks, that is 6000 households.

Even without infilling, if bicycles can gain a mode share of 5%, then that adds 300 households to the self-powered recruiting range of the station, more than 15% on top of the core pedestrian households ... raising it to over 1,800.

Further, the effective range of the bike is dependent on the strength of the rider. Assuming the same 5:1 ratio for the outer recruiting zone, then the outer recruiting "ring" is 1,600 acress, or 3,200 households, plus, with half acre blocks. If 1% of transport mode share was taken up by these "strong riders", then that would push the effective non-motorized transport market to over 2,000 households.


Core Recruiter: Neighborhood Electric Vehicles


This core recruiter is newer technology than the more than century old bike, and the Shanks Pony from as long as we have been around (how many millenia is, of course, is subject to some debate among the Republican Presidential candidates) ... but in the niche of getting around complexes, sprawling stadium parking lots, and similar tasks, it is a well established technology.

Neighborhood Electric Vehicles have a substantial part of their niche defined by the National Highway Traffice Safety Administration definition of a "low speed vehicle":

low-speed vehicles (as defined by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) are capable of up to 25 mph. Low-speed vehicles must have seatbelts, windshields, turn signals, headlights, brake lights and other safety equipment that golf cars don't require. NEVs are designed to be used in residential areas with low density traffic and low speed zones. With a top speed of 25 mph, low-speed vehicles can be used on streets with a posted 35 mph speed limit or less.

NEV's are street legal on 35mph or less streets, but unlike bikes are not normally legal to operate on higher speed avenues and highways. This makes it important to ensure that there is access to the train station via a network of 35mph routes.

The train station can encourage the use of NEV's by providing special parking close to the station for ultra-compact vehicles, and providing a charge station were a driver of a NEV can park&plug&ride.

Assume an average operating speed of 20mph, and a core recruiting radius of 15 minutes ... or 5 miles. With half acre blocks, that gives more than 100,000 households in the core recruiting radius. Turn 1% of those on to NEV's, and that is up to 1,000 additional core market households ... turn 5% on, and its up to 5,000.

Variety, of course, is the hallmark of a focus on high energy efficiency, since one-size-fits-all tends to be one-size-wastes-always. Also lying within this general niche are electric bikes and communities including a dedicated alternative path network for golf-carts.


Core Recruiter: Local Bus


Of course, some people are not in a position to walk a quarter mile to the station, and we will be building up both cycle-and-ride and park-plug-and-ride use of the HSR station over a decade or more to get the types of mode shares described in those sections.

Meanwhile, the first resort for providing an alternative to cars in outersuburbia is bus service. From personal observation, this is presently very heavily biased toward a mix of college, very low income, and wheelchair riders, but our experience in the US seems to have been that bus ridership can shift toward the mainstream as gas prices hit unaccustomed levels.

And it is in this respect that local buses and a HSR station can often be the best of friends. Part of the very successful re-introduction of commuter rail to Perth, Australia, was a system of short local bus routes tightly integrated to the service schedule at the local rail station. For some reason, people that would not dream of getting on a bus to go shopping will not blink twice at hopping onto a bus for a five minute ride to the local station.

I'm not sure why the stigma associated with riding the bus is so easily waved off with, "I've got a train to catch". This may be mysteriously connected to the psychology in which someone over the age of 30 riding a bus to get downtown is a failure (to specialized Maggie Thatcher's famous turn of phrase), but a fifty year old in a suit and tie will readily hop on a downtown free circulator bus in distinctive livery to get to a lunchtime eatery.

On the one hand, the local bus has a greater top speed than the NEV ... but on the other hand, there is scheduling leeway required if it is going to arrive reliably in advance of the departing train. So as a rough guestimate, I'm happy to take the 100,000 houses in the radius of the LEV, and aim for a similar 1%-5% mode share in people who would use the bus to reach the HSR station.


Core Recruiter: Local Rail


A major advantage of local rail is that it can often share the HSR station, allowing on-platform transfers between the HSR and local rail. Local rail that does not run on standard rail can normally be integrated comfortably with dedicated transfer stations.

Of course, one of the benefits of local rail is that the local core recruiter net surrounding the HSR station can be replicated around each of the stations of the local rail system:
* Each can be zoned for a donut of higher density stacked townhouse housing surrounding a mixed commercial/residential core
* Each provides the center of a wider ring of cycle-friendly access to the station
* Each provides the target for NEV's in the vicinity
* Each provides an traffic driver and interchange anchor for a system of short, local bus routes.

Of course, the Route Matrix Revolution applies to local rail at the HSR stop as well. If one local rail line is along the corridor that is carrying the HSR, then the HSR station is a natural location for another local rail to intersect from a different line of travel. The local transport centers focused on a local rail station can radiate out from the HSR station in multiple directions.


New Recruiter Technologies

Of course, these are just established technologies. There are a number of new transport systems coming down the pike that could serve as effective recruiters for HSR stations, but there are three that I would like to single out for mention.

Pluggable Hybrid Electric Vehicles
Regular HEV's gain two advantages from the battery-electric component of their drive train. The first is the greater efficiency of running combustion engines at a steady pace, and second is the energy recycling from recapturing energy while breaking that can be used again when re-starting.

Pluggable hybrid electric vehicles also gain from the greater energy efficiency of all-electric traction and from the cost savings available when buying electric power off-peak ... but only for the portion of the journey that takes place on stored electric power.

This means that if the normal drive to the station and back, plus sidetrips, falls within the normal all-electric range of the PHEV, the HSR station offers a natural complement to reliance on the PHEV for local driving. Just as with NEV's, this can be extended further and made sticker by providing park-and-plug-and-ride parking, in which the HSR user would pull in, deposit funds or leave an authorization for the electricity stored by the car, and head off to catch the train.

Aerobus / Elevated Suspended Local Light Rail
I have mentioned the Aerobus system previous, in Retrofitting Outer Suburbia. In essence, the system involves laying light rail on suspension cable, with the vehicle consisting of a passenger compartment suspended below an enclosed pod that contain the motors and wheels. This allows for a suspended vehicle with capital costs similar to a light rail vehicle installed into an already available right of way.

This system never got beyond pilot test status in the West, but its cost advantages and the relative simplicity of crossing water with the Aerobus has won the company two contracts in China ... one in a "Three-Rivers" urban setting, and another to connect an island city with the neighboring mainland.

This is an especially appealing option for providing a local rail system that cuts across the HSR corridor, where there is no suitable Right of Way available. Individual pylons about 600 feet apart provides for the lowest capital costs, but if there are tricky clearances, its possible for individual pylons to be up to 2,000 feet apart.

Running an Aerobus system across a rail corridor would allow an Aerobus island platform to have direct ramp / stairs / escalator and elevator connection to two or more rail platforms underneath. Since it is common for major employment centers like Hospitals, Universities, Shopping Malls and Office parks to be located at some distance from existing rail corridors, and an Aerobus system can provide service closer to the door than the average car in the parking lot.

Rail/Bus
This vehicle, being developed in Japan, functions on the same principle of track maintenance vehicles that can get around track breaks by driving on the road. It has rubber wheels for running on the road, and steel wheels for running on the track. A short access siding would normally be the only new infrastructure required.

This, of course, can get over the passenger home side of the "door to door" equation, allowing a service that a passenger could book to stop in front of their house, to be let off directly at the HSR station platform. It is also appealing for small towns that have grown away from their original rail-orientation ... instead of bringing a new rail line to the people, bring the people to the existing rail line.

On-call mini-bus


This core recruiter was brought to my attention by das monde, who diaried on it on 31 January (2007) in A transport service to reduce CO2 emissions.

The On-Call mini-bus combined the conventional Dial-A-Ride with an on-call taxi service. The conventional dial-a-ride simplified the logistics of the process with notional routes served by the dial-a-ride service and lead times of a day or longer. The On-Call mini-bus uses modern logistics mapping and GPS tracking technology to create the bus route on the fly, in response to demand.

From the user perspective, the next available service or service with a target pick up time will be available from mobile phone or internet, or by conventional telephone ... and the bus service can automatically inform the user of when the service will be picking up by SMS or email.


Your Turn

Now I throw the floor open. What are your ideas for effective Recruiters for HSR system ... and, yes, irrespective of my framing of this as a hypothetical outer-suburban HSR station, you can place your HSR station where you like ... in the middle of downtown, in a traditional cross-roads small town, or even, if you wish, in a tunnel station underneath the main terminal building of the international airport.