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.'"

Comments

Dear Mr Murdoch

[presidenteloco]

If you don't want to be hyperlinked to, you might consider

not putting your content on the worldwide web.

Dolt.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[Odinlake]

Additionally, if you want to be on the web but not listed by google there is a "bots" file. Dunno if that works with news aggregation but there's probably some way for little guys like Rupy to opt-out.

Oh my but the he wouldn't be paid would he?

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[Pharmboy]

That is the key: He wants the traffic, and he wants Google to PAY him for driving the traffic to him. It is kinda like Google adwords, except they pay you to advertise. (there is a soviet russia joke somwhere in there)

If he wanted to disallow Google, adding two lines to robots.txt is all it takes. This is just a money grab by someone who appears to really not "get it" about how the interweb works, and how there is simply more supply than demand when it comes to internet content of all kinds.

Google could simply choose to exclude Fox News from any spidering for news, but then RM would be suing Google saying they exclude him because they are (insert reasons here, such as "conservative"). Again, it is just a money grab by an old man who thinks "reading on the internet is like reading a paper, someone should pay for the right to read it", and you can't equate the two. It is more than just the medium that has changed.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[Narcogen]

Again, it is just a money grab by an old man who thinks "reading on the internet is like reading a paper, someone should pay for the right to read it", and you can't equate the two. It is more than just the medium that has changed.

Except that was never how newspapers worked, either, and Murdoch of all people should know it. Subscription fees and newsstand prices never did much more than pay for duplication and distribution. They certainly didn't contribute much, if any at all, to the costs of newsgathering.

So essentially in the old model news was free to anybody who bought a paper-- a paper full of advertisements, which are what really paid for the content to be generated. Advertisers knew how much to pay based on the demographics of the subscriber base and the paper's circulation.

Freed from the tyranny of ink and paper, content can now be delivered for pretty close to free-- so most of the time you don't need to subscribe or pay a newsstand cover charge, you just need to have Internet access. Advertisers, if they are thinking about it rationally, love this because unlike with newspapers and magazines, they know exactly how many people viewed an ad, how many people clicked it, and they may know a great deal more about that person, demographically, than they ever knew about any individual or group of individuals that made up a newspaper's subscriber base.

What I expect Murdoch is whining about is not Google Search. That does deliver him traffic. He's probably on about Google Reader, which uses RSS to present stories, whole or in part, divorced from the source's presentation (and thus its advertising). However I do suspect that like search, making content available in RSS does News Corp more good than harm-- if not, they could simply stop providing it.

If Google Reader is screenscraping News Corp sites then he's got a legitimate complaint. It's the equivalent of rip-and-read, but on the Internet.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[SanityInAnarchy]

This is where I really wish Google occasionally actually wrote the letters we pretend they do. For example:

Dear Mr. Murdoch,
As requested, we have stopped copying your content without permission. Unfortunately, this has resulted in your sites being removed from Google Search results, as our spiders have to copy content in order to index it. Sorry about that.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[WCguru42]

Sorry people, but Murdoch has a point. Professional reporting takes time and money, and if no one pays for it, it's not going to happen.

His advertisers are paying for it. His subscriptions (if any of his sites are subscription based) are paying for it. News sources deserve to make a profit if there product warrants it in the general capitalistic model. But Google should not be paying for it. That's like asking for money from someone who tells a friend to check out a wall street journal article because they thought it best answered the question their friend had.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[sortius_nod]

News corp, and unfortunately a company I work for are getting it wrong time and time again with the whole digital age. They are expecting people to pay for a service that advertising has paid for since newspapers were invented. It's general knowledge in the industry that if there were no subscribers (ie, people paying), not much would change. As long as the paper is in people's hands and advertisers are willing to pay stupid amounts for space, everyone gets paid.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[damburger]

Don't turn this into blanket gerontophobia please. Plenty of old people understand and use the internet perfectly well. In fact, I think Murdoch is in command of his faculties and does understand the internet (he can afford to have the very best people explain him to it, after all) - I think he is just being damn greedy. He isn't being stupid, he is counting on everyone else being stupid - a strategy that has served him well with business ventures such as Fox News and The Sun.

Right ...

[gslavik]

Media companies want Google to pay, not us (consumers). Because you can charge Google $X (where X has 7 digits) whereas to get consumer money, you have to produce a useful product.

A simple solution

[ivoras]

There's a very simple, mutually beneficial solution to this - Google should do Mr. Murdoch a favor and stop indexing his content. It's really a win-win scenario for everyone (including readers).

Re:A simple solution

[TRS80NT]

"...everyone (especially readers)."
There. Fixed that for you.

Re:A simple solution

[Strange Attractor]

We subscribe to four weekly paper magazines and use Google News to see what's happening on shorter time scales. For me as a consumer, News Corp's stuff is distracting and annoying clutter when Google indexes it.

I for one, second ivoras' solution.

Re:A simple solution

[fermion]

It will do no good. Murdoch lives in a fantasy world where one is not responsible for one's own actions. Just watch Fox News. When someone loses a job, it is the governments fault, and due to the fact that the person had no skills or chose to sell crappy products. The free market only works when the big business can do whatever they want, and smaller firms have to be subservient to them. The responsible free market solution is to at least block content from all users who are not subscribers, and at most put forth a competing search engine that requires a fee prior to linking to copyright information. but this would be the capatilist solution, which Murdoch would never go for. Instead he uses the socialist solution which is to have government pass more regulations which the tax payers then have to fund. It is like asking police to make sure that newspaper are read by only one person, then thrown away. I am sure he would love a law where our police would be responsible for arresting people who leave newspapers on park benches, or fining business who buy a personal subscription and then allow the customers to read it. Who cares if our taxes goes up. He doesn't pay them.

dear Rupert,

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Fuck off you pinhead. As noted: go to robot.txt file and add Disallow. Then they won't be able to steal from you. And no one will come to your fascist propaganda machine. don't like it? tough. Welcome to the 21st century.

The Irony...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

'The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content,

Considering that Murdoch owns MySpace and markets it to artists as a place where independents, and even established artists, can show their wares - in effect aggregating boatloads of content that is not his in the first place - the irony of his whining is almost too much to bear.

movement toward paid content?

[boguslinks]

But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content

The only evidence of a "movement toward paid content" that I have seen is Rupert Murdoch telling people that there is a movement toward paid content.

Re:Maybe he doesn't know?

[wizardforce]

Murdoch needs Google a lot more than Google needs Murdoch. All Google has to do is ignore Murdoch's content entirely until Murdoch learns his lesson or until his media empire collapses like the newspapers did. As for myself, I'm rooting for the latter to occur.

Murdoch not so smart, really

[syousef]

Murdoch may be a complete asshole but he's hardly stupid:

You're falling into the trap of thinking that success in high places must mean competence. The world isn't nearly that sane. So long as the guy hires smart people and is smart enough not to put too many obstacles in their way, that's smart enough.

Being an asshole however does seem to be a pre-requisit to great wealth. If you're fair to everyone and share your wealth, you simply never get rich enough for people to know your name. (You may make enough to live comfortably and have a good life, but you won't get rich and people will try to take advantage of you).

There's also the illusion that if you're bad tempered and mean you're getting ahead because you "don't put up with crap" and "don't suffer fools" and "don't get emotional when it comes to the tough decisions". In reality you're just a lucky arsehole whose only talent is in exploiting people.

Murdoch is not a technophobe

[TapeCutter]

Remeber that Murdoch is the guy who in the 80's busted the UK's entrenched print unions by modernising the Fleet street presses.

He doesn't want Google or anyone else to stop linking or he would have already stopped them by technical means, what he wants is a slice of Google pie, the bigger the slice the better. If he thinks ordinary people can't see through his feigned "push for paid content" then his sense of entilment must be at least an order of magnitute larger than his media empire.

Re:Murdoch is not a technophobe

[Asclepius99]

I think you're giving the man too much credit. You're reasoning is that because he knew a technology back in the 80s he should be aware of how technology works 20 years later and in a completely different medium.

It seems to me that this is more of a cause of him not understanding exactly how the internet works. Especially since he calls them "plagiarists" and "content kleptomaniacs*", which implies he thinks that they somehow are copying and keeping his content. Maybe he was just trying to be dramatic to get more attention, but I'm still pretty sure he's not exactly sure what it means when a search engine links to the page of a website without going through it. (This is guessing a lot, but I tend to think he believes that if he goes to paid content using a Google search will bring you to the content by going around the page that asks you to pay for it.)

*Google probably is the definition of a content kleptomaniac. They store all your information on their servers forever and their terms and agreements state that pretty much any content you e-mail, use their hosting service for, or put in any of their other tools becomes theirs. However, them being a search engine is pretty much their only service that they aren't kleptomaniacs about.

Re:Murdoch is not a technophobe

[jasonditz]

The line between professional blogger and professional journalist is an increasingly murky one (from day to day I'm not even sure which I am, but its definitely one or the other), and even if some of the major "dead tree" media sites haven't figured out how to make money there are a lot of others that do, albeit on a smaller scale.

But is that really a problem? I look at it like the OSS industry: there may never be the sort of revenues in the free software world that there was in the commercial software world, but plenty of open source projects/companies are profitable, and so long as the product is better, who cares?

Google isn't the problem here, and they're just being used as a scapegoat because they make money and other people don't. But I don't hear Canonical griping to HP just because HP is making a profit on their hardware and people just download Ubuntu for free, one of the few things that makes an HP system remotely usable.

The "old media" types have an outdated business model, but they also increasingly have a credibility problem. Most of their highest priced talent has gotten very sloppy in recent years, and a lot of them just pick their favorite politician or party and parrot the official line until told otherwise. Show me a well known newspaper columnist of the last ten years and I'll show you someone who has repeatedly claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Re:Murdoch is not a technophobe

[cgenman]

I wouldn't be surprised if Murdoch's beef with Google is not that Google makes the money, but that Google retains the audience. People go to news aggy sites, rather than entering into a News Corp empire portal, going to a News Corp source, and ultimately staying within the News Corp family throughout their visit. The latter is far more valuable than sharing ad revenue for a single article impression.

Re:Murdoch is not a technophobe

[khchung]

because we are FAR better served as a country by having professional journalists and bloggers, than by having bloggers alone.

While I agree this statement on the basis that by "professional journalists" mean people who "reported fairly and factually on world events important to most people". However, I have to contend that most (but not all) "media" we see day to day, including Murdoch's, are NOT populated by "professional journalists".

The only "professional" about most journalists we see in the media are only the sense that they get paid, i.e. it is their "profession" as a journalist.

About "actually do research and write something", most media companies are only doing the "write something" part, and are seriously lacking in the "do research" part. Note that I said "most", I admit there are a few journalists out there that really "do research and write something".

So, given that the current business model only give you a handful of real "professional journalists" mixed in sea of "journalists" not much better than bloggers, I am not sure what is the value of preserving this business model by having Google pay those media companies. It is the same argument for supporting RIAA because a few of their "artists" are really talented and deserved to be paid. Well, I suppose most people would think there should be a better business model to achieve that goal.

Google is fairly high on contention for "most profitable site on the 'web." A big reason for why they are so profitable is that they have a trusted search engine & an only sliightly-less-trusted news aggrigator. Both of these two exist by pointing to work someone ELSE is doing.

While this is somewhat off-topic regarding Murdoch, I think this statement downplayed the value Google is providing.

Consider this, there are lots and lots of knowledge available in the world, both static like a cooking recipe, or dynamic like the news or a blog. But the fact is, for most of human history, these knowledge are not available cheaply and timely to most people. What Google did is making the knowledge that already exists on the web available to anyone, that alone is providing tremendous value to most people, and I congratulate them for thinking of a business model that can also make a profit doing it.

Re:Please Google...

[WSOGMM]

Please Google, teach this old bag a lesson and kill all links to his website so we can no longer find any of his companies online. Do it!!! It would be a glorious day when we would be allowed to go to other news sources and let Murdoch die a slow death holding on to a fading newspaper.

As much as I hate Murdoch... all of those people that are just encouraging Google to teach him a lesson, you are also encouraging Google to be Evil. I dunno about you guys, but I, for one, don't want Google turning into Apple or Microsoft. We're the good guys, remember?!

Re:Please Google...

[swillden]

What's evil about complying with the man's publicly stated wishes?

A better solution

[jamesh]

A better solution would be for robots.txt (or a more secure equivalent) to allow google to know that they need to pay when their results come up in your search results. Of course, google will require the searcher (eg you) to pay to see those results. A simple click through would work ("click here to see this pay-per-view result - your account will be debited $0.01c"). Add another link at the top (and bottom) of the results for "Never, ever, show me pay-per-view search results again. It's a stupid idea and I hate it.".

The users are happy because they get to exclude search results from people who just don't get it.

Media empires will be happy because they got what they wanted (and unhappy as they go broke as they become invisible to the internet without understanding why, but that's not google's problem).

Google will be happy because all the companies that want this feature will finally stfu and go broke.