Murdoch Will Make Us Pay - The UpStream

Murdoch Will Make Us Pay

posted Sunday Nov 15, 2009 by Jon Wurm

Murdoch Will Make Us Pay

It seems that Murdoch and some international news execs have gone on quite the rampage against news aggregation sites, especially Google News, accusing them of "acting as a parasite." Murdoch also believes that aggregation sites and search engines do not fall under fair use rules. Making this statement,

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. 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.

I suppose this means that News Corp. has pulled their stories from Google's news index among other indexes right? No and here's why,

I think we will, but that's when we start charging (for online content). We have it (charging) 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.

Given that we are dealing with Rupert Murdoch and the fact that digital news aggregates have been around forever I'm surprised this hasn't come about sooner, except for the fact that Murdoch is a dinosaur and it takes them a while to come around.

This statement from Struan Bartlett, managing director of NewsNow, to TG Daily bascially sums up the fundamental issue here,

It's not clear whether Murdoch understands the difference between stealing and linking, or how he thinks blocking link aggregators would help him. If he stops Google or NewsNow from linking to his websites, people won't all simply start going to them directly instead.

When Murdoch starts charging, he's going to need sites like Google and NewsNow to drive custom to his websites.

Even Murdoch has admitted that News Corp. and the like have been asleep but that still makes them about 15 years too late. In this day and age, old school mega media corporations are going to find it incredibly difficult to keep up as technology and the opportunities that come with it change more quickly than ever. You need to have people behind the reigns that are more future oriented since the dinosaurs can't seem to keep up. Let us know what you think by commenting below.

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