Posted on 04/07/2010 10:46:54 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Rupert Murdoch has gone on the offensive to justify his plan to put his newspaper’s websites behind a paywall. He told a National Press Club event at George Washington University:
“We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing … there is a law of copyright and they recognise it.”
In an interview with Martin Kalb for The Kalb Report, Murdoch set out what the search engines would be permitted to do:
“We’ll be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that’s followed by a subscription form.”
The two comments are so strewn with misunderstandings that I can’t help wondering whether Rupert Murdoch is simply hoping to win the fight on rhetoric alone. The alternative is that he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Google and Microsoft don’t take anyone’s stories “for nothing”. They link to Murdoch’s stories and send traffic to his websites. Those links usually take the form of a “headline or a sentence or two”. Nothing that search engines do now conflicts with what Murdoch wants to happen. So what’s the problem?
Secondly, and more troubling, is Murdoch’s comment about copyright. He should know what every journalism student surely knows: you can’t copyright facts. If one of Murdoch’s newspapers reports that the moon is made of cheese, it’s perfectly ok for me to write “Moon made of cheese, News of the World reports”.
The solution to that problem is to change the rules. In the US the Associated Press has been arguing for an extension to the “hot news” right. This is a law that protects facts for a limited period of time in order to allow news organisations to benefit from their original reporting. AP
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
Murdoch is a creepy person who souled his soul to the Saudis and ChiComs.
The Uk Telegraph and their sister paper the Daily Mail run by the Barclay Brothers are the real deal. Probably the only people in the media business, besides Investors Business Daily, who are not CFR,Davos, bilderberger types.
Not only that....Murdoch got his start in the Aussie newspaper business by supporting Labour Party candidates....people who think he is “conservative” have him wrong. He is an opportunist....as CNN is to Cuba....Murdoch is to Communist China
Not really. He got his start in the newspaper business by inheriting his father's, Sir Keith Murdoch's, already fairly substantial media holdings, and most of his early career (from 1953-1964) was spent supporting the conservative government of Sir Robert Menzies. He then transferred his support to the minor, if anything more conservative, party in the conservative coalition - the Country Party under Black Jack McEwan (from 1964-1972).
He did support Gough Whitlam and the Labor Party in the 1972 election, but abandoned that support before the end of 1974.
In the UK, he supported Thatcher in the 1980s.
He is, as you say, an opportunist - he'll switch sides to anybody who gives him what he wants. But throughout his career, he has tended more to the right than the left, whether because of some actual convictions or just because that's the way it happens to have worked out, I couldn't say. But it's not very accurate to suggest he supported Labor early on. At that time, conservatism was definitely in the ascendancy in Australia (23 years of consecutive conservative rule) and he was playing that game.
Him and about X million other people in Oz, FRiend.
Much of which is based on lies and myths yes. But at least most of those chippy ‘straylians who are pommy-baiting, resentful, chain-dragging colonials don’t come to Britain, take over a huge section of our press and use it to try and influence public opinion to try and get our government to institute policies that correspond to their business interests like this particular one did...
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