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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.'"
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.
Murdoch may be a complete asshole but he's hardly stupid: I'm sure his tech people explained to him that Google respects the Robot Exclusion Protocol. All the big boys do ... not to do so would be a. sleazy and b. stupid, since there are plenty of litigious fucks like Murdoch out there. The fact that he's making such misinformed claims in apparent ignorance indicates that he has another agenda, one of which we currently know nothing. Ultimately though, I think it comes down to an outfit like Google, with the stated goal of indexing all the world's knowledge, coming into direct conflict with those who wish to restrict access to knowledge for profit. What makes matters worse for the likes of Murdoch is that Google makes its money from other sources, and is not responsive to the same motivations and perceived threats as the incumbent news organizations. If Newscorp and every other such "service" were to disappear tomorrow, it would make little difference to Google's bottom line.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'm not sure why some of you think he doesn't want Google to link to him - that's not what he says at all. What Rupert Murdoch wants is for Google to link to him and pay him money for the privilege. He's smart enough to know that his media empire, from which he's made billions, is dying - but he isn't smart enough to figure out how to transform his dying business into a new type that can survive and thrive in the new electronic world (but then neither has anyone else as of yet). So he's doing the only thing he can think of, which is attempt to shift the blame over to the innovators that are responsible for his industry dying.
Now, as the old media continues to die off, I wouldn't be all that surprised to see a company like Google make an effort to build a new media company with paid reporters and the like - but there's absolutely no reason that would involve someone like Rupert Murdoch, since he'd basically be relegated to the role of unnecessary middle-man.
#DeleteChrome
The real problem is simply answered. Can I, through the use of Google obtain Rupert Murdoch's content without ever visiting his site or seeing ads on his site?
If the answer is no, then someone doesn't understand.
If the answer is yes, then there is a real problem. I tend to think that the answer is yes on a couple of levels. First off, can I use a "Murdoch" headline and then read the content somewhere else? Yup, I am sure I can do that. Secondly, can I use Google to grab "Murdoch" content without visiting any of his sites? Yup, I can use the Google cache and never touch the original site.
Finally, doesn't Google show enough of the text to let me know if I really want to look at the whole article on the site?
No, this isn't anywhere near as simple as just using robots.txt to deter Google from indexing. This is using a service from Google to preempt other sites.
But Murdoch's brand of news is quickly becoming more discordant with the American political environment than the others. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has always been a decent read* until Rupe got his hands on it. Now its editorial section isn't even worthy of wiping asses. I hope that more and more Americans are quickly falling out of favor with Australian-style right-wing bullshit**.
;)
* I am leftist scum.
** To their credit, FoxNews posted this article and its follow-up when no other mainstream media did. Kudos Rupe, now let's hear a little more truth and noone will get hurt
umm.. I know lots of "computer literate" people who have never heard of robots.txt.. the vast majority of people I know actually. This whole internet thing is still just magic to most people.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Reminds me of the time that someone threatened to sue me for a copyright violation after I linked to several pages in a site that had been archived on the wayback machine (it was a series of web articles that the author had decided to publish in book form.) I had lots of fun contemplating how their internet lawyers would have accomplished that, especially since the smarter thing to do would have been to request that the wayback machine stop archiving their site. Can someone please explain to Mr. Murdock how the Series Of Tubes actually works?
Riight. 1. If I was one of Murdoch's techs I'd be keeping particularly quiet about how stupid he sounds.. and 2. I expect Murdoch wouldn't even consider the possibility that other people see things differently to him, let alone that he might be wrong about something, or not understand it fully.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"/Dear/ Mr. Murdoch,
In wishing to completely and speedily address your worries, we have permanently removed all domains owned by your corporation from our search index. You will now no longer suffer from an onslaught of non-paying visitors to your sites. With the best wishes, Google."
They should stop fucking around. Murdoch and the other paid-content-idiots know they can't do business without the search engines linking to them, and if they don't, it's high time they learned it. They need the search engines more than the search engines need them.
Murdoch's News Corp, otoh, is on all fronts doing what everyone else in the "actually do research and write something" industry is doing -- losing money.
Do you not mean the "rewrite stuff from press releases and news wires, distorting it to suit a political or business agenda" industry. People will pay for good content: It works for the FT and the New Scientist.
professional journalists and bloggers, than by having bloggers alone
Most of the blogs I read are better than anything the journalists produce. For example, I get news on the economy by reading blogs by economists, rather than a journalists summary of what he or she half understood after interviewing economists.
Typical News Corp. Look at the recent Faux News bits about the tea parties - "OMG ITS SUCH A NATIONWIDE GRASSROOTS PROTEST!"
The entirety of his business model, it seems, is to come up with something and go on about how big a deal it is, until it actually becomes a semi-big deal.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
The old bastard may be old be he's not stupid, he gets it all right. The problem here is that he wants to change it all so that he can make money from things we didn't have to pay for in the past.
It's the old story about fencing things off and then charging admission. Murdoch has been very active in the internet space for well over a decade. I lost a job in 2001 after Murdoch bought the company I was with and kept just the small bit he was after to use for internet publishing. It wasn't just someone employed by Murdoch doing this, he was involved himself.
Anecdotes aside, it appears that he wants us all to pay him subscription fees and many things are in the way, google for a start.
He was certainly making expensive business decisions about internet companies in 2001, so unfortunately for us all that makes you the one that is out of touch while he has had his finger on the pulse for more than a decade.
Murdoch understands it all right, the problem is he is quite happy to try to do what we would consider unthinkable to the the internet if there is money in it. He's been considering this for a long time, owns a lot of tech companies and has disproportionate amounts of political clout due to his media holdings. US Republicans love him due to Fox News and think he's one of theirs because they never think that he's just broadcasting that crap for the money. US Democrats love him because they know he's a million miles politically away from the Republicans and he has all that lovely money to donate. He's a crafty old bastard with people with all the technical knowlege that could be found on this forum happy to advise him and he listens - and he's not afraid to look like a stupid old bastard if that gets him closer to the money. He'd also be happy to bring an enormous copyright law shitstorm onto the internet and change it for the worse forever just to get people to see his banner advertisements instead of a google page. He doesn't care if there end up being weird laws that render search engines useless. I think this moaning about google stealing stuff is aimed firmly at those that pass laws, he doesn't care what techies think, we'll have no say in it.
It's not that Rupert Murdoch doesn't understand the internet. The problem is that he doesn't care if portions of it break.
This is similar to authors who complain about their books getting listen in catalogs with excerpts (?) from their books, or horror of horrors, libraries.
Murdoch ain't even smart enough to come up with new idiotic complaint.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
After crawling Murdochs news sites, Google should look up which of his compettitors run the same article, and quote that compettotor instead.
This article is about Rupert Murdoch so we're not talking about real news.
We have too much news as it is. There isn't enough interesting things going on to justify numerous 24 hour news outlets. Imo, this is why some are sensationalising news and effectively turning opinion into fact too.
We don't need that and it's damages society.
We could do with these big news corporations falling apart. Go back to more localised news and if you want to find out about news outside of your area then go to Google.
Murdoch might be looking at things differently
First, he has come to the conclusion that people don't type in http://www.google.com/ to an address bar to visit Google, they're going to Google to eventually go somewhere else.
Second, he probably feels that his newspapers get a lot of web traffic. I have no idea, I'll assume they do.
Third, since he seems to own most of the major newspapers these days, he's probably convinced himself that he is an important part of the internet.
Fourth, he realizes Google is making money from these searches. He's right, of course. Google isn't a charity, and they manage to make money off search.
Fifth, if Google is making money connecting the average internet searcher with his content and making money from it, he probably wonders why he isn't seeing any of that money.
Therefore, from his viewpoint, he's spending all the money building content, but Google is making money from it. And while I'm sure his lawyers have advised him that it's legal, he's trying to figure out get a piece of that revenue.
Now I'm not agreeing with this thought process, but you can see how a businessman known for making $Billions would look at that revenue stream of Google's and try to figure out how to take it away. This is business 101 for him.
I don't think he's alone; the entire net neutrality debate is pretty much wrapped up this these types of thought processes.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
That's rather the question, as he'd presumably still want to appear in Google search results outside of Google News. So a simple Disallow wouldn't *quite* do the job; he'd have to be able to disallow only the news aggregators, which would only be possible if they had a different signature to regular Googlebot.
So he may have to just dissallow everything, which would be fair. Is there any way, as a community service, way we could all chip in a few bucks and buy him an Internet Death Penalty?
Hmm... not convinced.
I do remember reading an article that said he has his emails printed out and brought to him...
He's probably wandering around NewsCorp HQ right now, trying to find the typing pool.
Information wants to be beer.
As newspapers go out of business the value of the remaining ones will increase. It will mean more valuable advertising space, more readers, perhaps even a desire to pay for some more specialized news.
That's the key point there. If you go to Google News and find an article on something even remotely national newsworthy, you'll see their little link at the bottom "View 3000+ news articles . . .". Most of them say pretty much the same thing over and over. That's an over-saturated market. Of course some are going to go out of business with the transition to online news simply because a single provider can reach a much larger number of subscribers.
The ones who figure out how to survive in the market will be the ones to stay. Old relics like Murdoch will go and won't likely be missed. Whatever the case though, the market will support whatever it deems most acceptable and reasonable. If that means paying for news then we'll pay for news - but still from a MUCH smaller pool of providers than exist now. However, if it means not paying for news, and I don't believe the market will pay for it, then no amount of temper tantrums from rich old geezers will change that.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
If google just stopped indexing all his "intellectual property", he'd be laughed out of complaining about it because of his now quite public previous statements. He's already dicked himself and he doesn't even know that.
And I think google should do this NOW and set a precedent by showing these online news content complainers exactly what they are asking for. And google has another ace in the hole, it isn't that much for them to just regurgitate the AP and other feeds either, they can afford it, and could easily just wipe out most online newspapers today if they felt like it. Then they could expand from there and start pushing the better of the world wide independent blog scene. There's just no absolute need anymore to have expensive "flown in" journalists to go cover this or that news event when there are millions of people already living there all over who can write well enough to pass, who are already carrying net enabled cellphones with cameras, and want to write, primarily for funzies, and have a big interest in seeing their local "hot breaking news" covered.
Google's indexing is like getting put in the old dead trees yellow pages for free, if they went to the real yellow pages style of CHARGING for indexing for commercial sites like murdoch's news ventures, this would sort that out fast.
I hope they call his bluff and just stop indexing anything he owns just to put that cretin in his place.