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

[SEAL]

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...

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

[interkin3tic]

You have to look at it from his perspective.

Basically his perspective is "Someone else has money. I want it." ...

Not the best perspective by my standards, but he has many times more money than I do, so who am I to say he's a F*#@#ing idiot.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr Murdoch may be simply quite too stupid to understand the plumbing of the internet and that he indeed does have control of some of the values, ie Robots files. His father (or grandfather) was probably indoor plumbing-challenged too, with all those levers and values on toilets, etc.

At some point, old age, impacts the ability of some people to understand new things.

Mr. Murdoch may be an example of the old dogs and new tricks syndrome.

Given his personaility, it is probably unlikey that given his nepotistic and dictatorial tendencies, that he is likely to hear that his business model may be someout out of step with the 21th century.

It is sad in a certain way.

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

[dbIII]

This is just a money grab by someone who appears to really not "get it" about how the interweb works

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.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[damburger]

True. The 'move towards paid content' he describes is the movement he wants to start. Enclosure is exactly the right analogue; men like him have always made money by setting themselves up as middlemen, not adding to the system but simple charging for access to part of it that was previously free.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[damburger]

Professional reporting is dead, and nowhere demonstrates this more elegantly that Fox News.

Precisely because its expensive to send out correspondents to do real reporting, big media has stopped doing it. Having Bill O'Reilly throw a tantrum at some unsuspecting guest is cheap and grabs ratings.

Consider the recent turmoil after the Iranian election; twitter contained almost as much information as the big news outlets (who were, in some cases, reporting what was on twitter). How many of them actually had guys on the ground in Iran? I can't think of a single one, because it would be expensive and dangerous work. So the news sites did what the rest of us did and looked on twitter. If they do that, then why are they needed?

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.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[xaxa]

Precisely because its expensive to send out correspondents to do real reporting, big media has stopped doing it.

In the last couple of months hundreds of adverts have appeared in London (mostly on the Underground) for the Times saying how they have lots of science correspondants. Although having just searched Google for one to check I remembered it correctly, I'm no longer as impressed.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[thejynxed]

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.

Re:Dear Mr Murdoch

[WaywardGeek]

Actually, I have it on pretty good authority that Obama was born in Hawaii, is a practising Christian, prefers women to men, wrote a couple of insightful books, and got elected democratically to lead the world's leading democracy, rather than a communist nation. I also heard he won some prize recently, but I could be mistaken about that.

However, many people prefer to believe fiction rather than the truth. Feel free to dig for your own particular flavor of fiction if you are looking to blind yourself. It's amazing how many of us prefer such fiction to real news, which is one of the many reasons news providers are in trouble.

I feel so sorry for poor little Ruppy

[onionman]

Must be absolutely horrible having all those evil search engines actually index his pages! I guess his robots files aren't working or something.

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.

Re:Right ...

[BKX]

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

Maybe he doesn't know?

[Golddess]

Someone should send an email explaining robot.txt to the poor guy. Maybe he's just ignorant about how to keep the big bad Google from "stealing" his content.

Re:Maybe he doesn't know?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Oh; but the poor baby wants it both ways: He wants google to index his stuff, and pay him for the privilege of indexing his stuff.

If this involved google ignoring robot.txt or something, and crawling him without his permission, I'd be rather more sympathetic. As it is, though, these guys haven't asked for that, because they know that it is valuable to them; but are still whining about how oppressed they are. Fuck 'em.

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.

Re:Maybe he doesn't know?

[GaryPatterson]

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.

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.

Re:A simple solution

[damburger]

Looking at those girls, the first word that comes to mind is not 'expensive'...

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.

Re:dear Rupert,

[tagno25]

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

Read between the lines ...

[ScrewMaster]

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.

Re:Read between the lines ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Read between the lines ...

[Chaos Incarnate]

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

Re:Read between the lines ...

[ScrewMaster]

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

That's too bad. Google's spider really has better things to do than index Fox News ... for example, my great aunt Betty's second cousin's daughter's wedding photos.

Rupert Murdoch is something else.

[Cytlid]

I bet he thinks the dewey decimal system "steals" content from libraries by classifying and categorizing books.

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.

Misinterpretation

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:google: another banker owned entity

[schon]

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.

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.

Real problem

[cdrguru]

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.

Re:Real problem

[SEE]

No, this isn't anywhere near as simple as just using robots.txt to deter Google from indexing.

Sure it is. If Google's spider is blocked from indexing "Murdoch" content by robots.txt, it's also blocked from caching any "Murdoch" content, the "Murdoch" headline never shows up on Google News, and there isn't any "Murdoch" text appearing to let me know if I really want to look that the whole article.

Murdoch has, in fact, deliberately made content available for free by and through Google. Before Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal, all Wall Street Journal news content could not be accessed by Google News, and could not be obtained by using Google News or a Google cache. You could only get WSJ content by going to the WSJ site. After Murdoch took over the Wall Street Journal, all Wall Street Journal content was made accessible to Google News. Furthermore, the WSJ paywall was deliberately lowered to allow people to read articles on the WSJ site for free if they follow a link to the article from Google News.

Murdoch isn't letting Google access this content by accident or through ignorance. He has actively chosen to make this content available by and through Google. He can undo that any time he chooses, for any of his sites.

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

[Planesdragon]

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.

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.

Now, Google's all fine and dandy with not getting any direct revenue from these things -- they get trust, and knowledge, which let them sell the ads that bring in all that revenue.

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. News Corp can insulate themselves fairly well, by just funneling money from profitable venutres that don't produce a lot of original material (Fox News TV) to those that produce the material (Wall Street Journal). But, while this works for Murdoch, it doesn't really work for anyone else.

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

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:Murdoch is not a technophobe

[jesset77]

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.

Oliver's point about the value of Google's service is a point lost on most armchair entrepreneurs these days.

Too many of us get hung up on "creativity" being the only valuable service you can provide digitally, the product of which becomes some kind of "product" which should then be marketed to the masses by least efficient and most pocket-lining means possible.. be that Murdock, RIAA, PRS, whoever.

We then disrespect any second tier services that may organize and present this information to you in a meaningful form. Of what value is data when it is uselessly separated from it's consumers, or lost amidst a sea of inscrutable noise?

Take Google Books as another example. There are books languishing in libraries far from the hands of those who may benefit from reading them, out of print, orphaned and insulated from reproduction by our beloved copyright laws.. just waiting to be misplaced or accidentally damaged beyond repair. Google decides for good or ill to digitize all these tomes and make them available online. Suddenly everyone from authors to slashdotters, even the gutenburg project calls foul about data that was never otherwise practicably accessible to begin with. Apparently Google is "stealing" revenue from creators who have left their creations derelict in the first place. Unlike the water ways, textual information has no "salvage laws".

Regarding Google Books, I am not claiming Google is beyond the ability of making shady business deals, what I am saying is that I never hear press about the bare concept of bringing this content into the digital domain. I get the impression that we would prefer the books rot and the knowledge be lost forever than that anyone makes half a dime as a consequence of bringing the data back into play.

To me, IP has become such an ugly concept recently. One day someone will figure out cold fusion or cure cancer, present the proof on a napkin in order to win a $5 bar bet with their skeptical buddy and then throw the napkin away. Someone else will find the napkin and create the needed business infrastructure to bring this anonymous discovery to the world. The original creator will then shut them down (perhaps even instead of demanding royalties) and it seems like the public will dance around the flames of the demolished industry as we celebrate some kind of a victory for IP, all the while dying of cancer and killing one another over dwindling fossil fuels. Our cultural priorities seem truly and heinously misplaced whenever IP is involved.

I contend that creating or discovering knowledge is not the single most important thing in the world. If the knowledge cannot be used to better human life, if the creator decides to hold out forever for monetary gains it is never reasonable for them to see, then what utility is IP law to anyone? I say all content is devalued when monopolized by it's creators. Having an idea does not automatically make you the best steward for the idea. Information does not spring forth from the mind of a journalist or artist as a shrink-wrapped product, instead it is created by molding from the raw materials of prior information and to be marketable must be molded further still by producers, organized by distributers and delivered to end users. All of these steps add value and everyone who contributes should have some kind of an opportunity to make profit from their contribution without having to cowtow to arbitrary "rights holders" who have normally fleeced the deed from the originator to begin by mere

http://www.foxnews.com/robots.txt

[SpaceManNH]

User-agent: *
Disallow: /printer_friendly_story
Disallow: /projects/livestream
#
User-agent: gsa-crawler
Allow: /printer_friendly_story
Allow: /google_search_index.xml
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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.

He wouldn't stand a chance in court

[zogger]

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.