Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has said in an interview with Sky News Australia that newspapers within his empire - including the Sun, Times and Wall Street Journal - could block Google searches entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories on the web.In the last few months, Murdoch has begun a war of words with Google, accusing the search giant of "kleptomania" and being a "parasite" for including bits of articles from Murdoch's news websites in its free Google News service. According to the Guardian, when Murdoch was questioned why they hadn't simply opted to remove their websites from Google's search indexes, he said it is on the cards.
"I think we will, but that's when we start charging," he said. "We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it's not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story - but if you're not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form."
Murdoch also added that he did not agree that search engines fell under "fair use" rules - something which many websites like Google News use as their legal justification for displaying excerpts of a story.
"There's a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether... but we'll take that slowly."
In the TV interview, the 78 year-old made his feelings known towards services such as Google News by naming a short list of companies he felt were overstepping the mark.
"The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it - steal our stories, we say they steal our stories - they just take them. That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people... they shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."
During the summer, Murdoch announced plans to introduce website charges by next year, although it emerged last week that the plans had been delayed, with the media mogul saying, "I wouldn't promise that we're going to meet that date."
While I do not like Murdock or his companies/views, I do see the point that creators of content should feel entitled to profit from it. Standard TV uses advertisments (within the show and commercial breaks) and so can the web/print media. I believe that when micropayments finally come along we will see sites that can offer interesting or viable content for an acceptable price structure. (ie: 1 cent to 5 cents per article)
This will not stop people from sharing the content, it will simply allow those who feel that the content is of some value to pay a price for it. For example: the charge of $1 per song is simply too high as well as the musician is not being properly compesated for their work. There needs to be a site run with the musicians where they can post their work for an acceptable price and they reap at least half of the cost of the media.
The structure of media distribution has changed because of the internet as there is less of a need for many of the middle-men. Recording, movie and now print media are pushing back against this, but the change has happened and it will not go back.
And the internet isn't exactly low on people willing to give their opinion about a subject or story, so it's not like it's worth paying for.
Edit: While I'm fine with paying a reasonable fee for a song or a TV show episode, I'm not going to pay for a description of an event that happened, or somebody's opinion about it, I can get that for free from thousands of other places.
Fair point: *IF* news (CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NY Times, etc) were giving just pure facts (as News should) however I've been reading the newspapers for over 30 years (now only online, I'm not that old) and I cannot recall a time when The News was just pure facts.
Last edited by dimithrak on 09 Nov 2009 - 14:15
Murdoch's being a bit of an arse tbh, I understand that they want to be paid for their work but there are many ways of making money through a website without making people pay for the content. Especially a far as news is concerned.
Then I thought: no, maybe they'll block employees of those newspapers from accessing Google.
In actuality, am I right in thinking that he's just gonna start making use of robots.txt? And there's nothing else to it?
I would say that blocking out google would be like not having a sign on the main road of your shop and charging for news articles would be like having an entrance fee to see your main product (which is advertising).
/lol
Everyone is talking about A-Wipe (No I dont care for the man), but I think everyone is over looking a major comment he made that should scare people. "Fair Use" "Challenged in the court" "Bar it all together", come on now, with DMCA and the new acta (or whatever its called) and major corporate powers already trying to take Fair use away, a megapower like Murdock (The man has enough business in enough countries) could drop some major money in an effort to undo (bar it in his words) fair use rules. That should scare people.
Everyone is talking about A-Wipe (No I dont care for the man), but I think everyone is over looking a major comment he made that should scare people. "Fair Use" "Challenged in the court" "Bar it all together", come on now, with DMCA and the new acta (or whatever its called) and major corporate powers already trying to take Fair use away, a megapower like Murdock (The man has enough business in enough countries) could drop some major money in an effort to undo (bar it in his words) fair use rules. That should scare people.
He's not talking about barring fair use generally, he's talking about not having it apply in this situation.
The answer is public financed campaigns or permitting candidates to only receive contributions from those that can vote for said candidate.
I picked up one of my favorite magazines recently and it almost felt like a catalogue, due to the sheer number of ads it had.
Whether we like it or not, unless something changes in the industry and brings advertisement revenues up we are heading for a Pay 2 Use model for a lot of the things we take for granted today.
I wouldn't hold it against Times or WSJ for being the first. I'd prefer them to continue operating than to close down due to lack of revenue. There's already more than enough bad free journalism on the internet.
How exactly is that good from a marketing perspective?
"Oh yeah, let's draw my sites into obscurity, THAT will help!"
Someone explain to him how the Internet and its users work. The point of search engines, and so on.
Also,
No. They show news story EXCERPTS, stupid. They don't steal any news stories, you ignorant dinosaur. To read the actual article, one still need to actually visit the news site in question, which could be YOUR site. Hence, Google/MS/ect actually help draw traffic to your site. Well, and inform that your competitors also carry the news story. Maybe THAT is what he's afraid of.
Building bubbles of information one need to pay for online never, ever, worked. Interoperability and openness is where it's at. Because of competition.
Last edited by Jugalator on 09 Nov 2009 - 12:49
He clearly has no idea on how to embrace such a large audience and the benefits from large amounts of traffic.
He should be working with google not against them.
The world is gearing towards open source information, not paid services.
Last edited by barteh on 09 Nov 2009 - 13:50
The subscription fee for online news will never work unless you get most of the content free, an example of this is autosport, where the general news you can read with adverts for free but for magazine style features you need a subscription.
I dont get the "we can't make money from adverts online" argument. Why is it that they do still seem to pay when they are on a printed medium, but not when they are on the newspapers website? Surely if your website can be seen by anyone in the world, at a higher volume of custom, the advertising space should be worth more to your company than an advert printed in a newspaper with a shrinking readership. Why are marketing companies paying less for adverts online? Is it because most people block them?
Please remove your tabloid quality, propaganda driven content from the Internet.
Sincerely,
Citizens of the World.
Signed a liberal... just because it seems to bother you.
:sarcasm:
Please adjust your robots.txt to block google's web crawler bots from indexing your asociated & owned websites. I for one would be happy as I'm sure many other internet dwellers would be also.
I'm sure that a few people will be able to support your paid news idea & wish you all the best for the future.
Signed,
Aergan
One of the humble internet folk.
Thankfully, it looks like that is precisely what he intends to do with this latest naive initiative.
I think he's turning into an old codger. Needs some new blood.
"they also have that one video site" ... uh you mean YOUTUBE??
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