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Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content

Hugh Pickens writes Weston Kosova writes in Newsweek that Rupert Murdoch gave an impassioned speech to media executives in Beijing decrying that search engines — in particular Google — are stealing from him, because Google links to his stories but doesn't pay News Corp. to do so. 'The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,' Murdoch says. 'But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.' But if Murdoch really thinks Google is stealing from him, and if he really wants Google to stop driving all those readers to his Web sites at no charge, he can simply stop Google from linking to their news stories by going to his Web site's robot.txt file and adding 'Disallow.'"

8 of 504 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Dear Mr Murdoch by SEAL · · Score: 5, Informative

    Or make your site subscription-based. Of course you might want to talk with the guys over at Slate first to see how well that works out...

  2. Re:Read between the lines ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.newscorp.com/robots.txt:
    User-Agent: *
    Disallow:

    Hmm, so they have heard of robots.txt and already made the decision not to restrict any search engines...

  3. Re:google: another banker owned entity by schon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Technically he is right.

    No, he isn't.

    And Google really do take without providing anything back.

    Bullshit. As the summary stated: if Newscorp really was the victim here, they'd implement a robots.txt file telling Google to go away.

    The problem is that if Google went away, Newscorp would lose business.

    The rest of your post is even more idiotic than your first two sentences. (Come on, legal theft? If it was theft, it wouldn't be legal, asshat.)

    You have every choice not to deal with them. It's perfectly possible to do without - there are other search engines, other webmail providers, other banner networks. If you have a website, you can even exclude them in your robots.txt if you want.

  4. Re:Read between the lines ... by Chaos+Incarnate · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not only that, but the one on foxnews.com provides Google sitemaps.

    --
    Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
  5. Re:Right ... by BKX · · Score: 4, Informative

    Dude, go back school. 0.000001 only has one sigfig. 1.000000 has 7. 0.000001000000 has seven also.

  6. Re:dear Rupert, by tagno25 · · Score: 5, Informative
    and here is foxnews.com's robot.txt

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /printer_friendly_story
    Disallow: /projects/livestream
    #
    User-agent: gsa-crawler
    Allow: /printer_friendly_story
    Allow: /google_search_index.xml
    Allow: /google_news_index.xml
    Allow: /*.xml.gz
    #
    Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_index.xml
    Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml

    Notice the sitemap section, they are directly telling Google what news they have

  7. Re:Maybe he doesn't know? by GaryPatterson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Murdoch is not an Australian - he gave up his citizenship as soon as it hindered his US interests.

    He's as American as any other immigrant.

    On behalf of Australians everywhere, I'm sorry that he's your problem now.

  8. Re:Dear Mr Murdoch by thejynxed · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google News is what is he's complaining about.

    He doesn't mind the search links, the RSS feed, etc.

    He's complaining that Google News is gathering the content from his News Corp properties using their Googlebot, and taking all of the advertising revenue because Google places their own paid ads on the pages instead of the News Corp ads that would appear from the originating sites.

    This is the same issue/complaint that organizations like the AP and Reuters have with Google.

    --
    @Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.