Posted on 10/10/2009 8:51:45 AM PDT by chuck_the_tv_out
News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch has launched a stinging attack on Google and other online entities for stealing content.
At a conference of World Media Executives at Beijing's Great Hall of the People, Rupert Murdoch has taken aim at search engines like Google as internet parasites.
According to the News Corporation Chairman, the so-called "aggregators" on the internet steal content from traditional media organisations and, he says, the time has come for them to pay for it.
"If we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators - the people in this hall - who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph," he said.
Human rights groups have criticised China for hosting the media summit given the level of press censorship
(Excerpt) Read more at abc.net.au ...
This hack has just taken the standard manipulative techniques they use for politics and applied it to pushing his firm's position.
"stinging attack": the attack was fruitful, it worked, it "stung".
"stealing content": no quotes implies valid premise
"so-called "aggregators"": derision quotes implies invalid premise
"Human rights groups have criticised China for hosting the media summit": more likely they criticised the media summit for holding it in China. But since "the media summit" is an offshoot of his firm, he just lies again
From a technical perspective it is trivially easy to block Google from indexing and caching content.
I agree. Murdock is within his rights to expect to be compensated for content that he pays people to create. That’s fair. But it’s also fair that he ought to take some precautions to protect his property. If he were to block Google, put them on notice that he will only remove the block if they agree to pay for content, and they still take it for free, then he may have a reason to go after them.
Someone has to pay to create web (or any other) content, it doesn’t “just happen”. The precedent is clear, you can’t go record ABC news for example, and charge people to watch it. The media is evolving but in the end, it will still work, or new content creators will replace the existing ones.
he doesn’t evcen have to “block” google.
Google fully respects the contents of a site’s robots.txt file - which is akin to putting up a friendly notice at the entrance that soandso (or veery robot) is not welcome there.
One line of text in that file on each of his sites, and Mr Murdoch’s content will completely vansih from Google over the course of the next weeks.
A nice letter to Google would also do the trick as well.
Murdoch is just a bloviating fraud here.
I am in a location where I can ONLY get CNN International on cable and thankfully FR in the net. Rupert may know just how his product is. It should scare the life out of the other news agencies!
[If he were to block Google, put them on notice that he will only remove the block if they agree to pay for content, and they still take it for free, then he may have a reason to go after them.]
But if you block Google, which is where I get most of my research, you have zero traffic. So, good luck with that Rupert.
But Murdoch does exactly the opposite.
Consider the Wall Street Journal. If you go to the front door without a subscription, many of the articles are limited to the first paragraph or so. However, if you arrive via a Google page (or seem to), you get to see the whole article.
Murdoch wants that incremental traffic! If he can get the visitor to pay, fine. But he still wants the ad revenue.
The times they are a'changing.
“Google fully respects the contents of a site’s robots.txt file”
Hmm. Debatable. If you put something to not be crawled in robots.txt they will crawl it just to find out what’s so interesting. They may not list it, but they go have a look anyway. Others don’t do that.
Come on Ruppert quit threatening and block all unpaid access to your media products, I dare you! The WSJ actually is better than most of their competition but still not worth paying for, IMO. The WSJ editorial board and writers are not that good only slightly better than the general Leftist Scum Media. I actually like the Daily Telegraph more than the WSJ, the DT’s political blogs are the best in the world, Dan Hannan blogs there...+ Dmingpole is great on the AGW fraud.
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