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Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content

Posted by timothy on from the what-part-of-come-in-don't-you-understand? dept.

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.'"

4 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: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

  4. 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.