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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.'"

20 of 504 comments (clear)

  1. Dear Mr Murdoch by presidenteloco · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    not putting your content on the worldwide web.

    Dolt.

    --

    Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
    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:Dear Mr Murdoch by interkin3tic · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    3. Re:Dear Mr Murdoch by Pharmboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
    4. Re:Dear Mr Murdoch by Narcogen · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Dear Mr Murdoch by damburger · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
  2. Right ... by gslavik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. A simple solution by ivoras · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

    --
    -- Sig down
    1. Re:A simple solution by TRS80NT · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

      --
      Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
    2. Re:A simple solution by Strange+Attractor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:A simple solution by fermion · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
  4. dear Rupert, by Ralph+Spoilsport · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
    1. 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

  5. movement toward paid content? by boguslinks · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. 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...

  7. Murdoch is not a technophobe by TapeCutter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    1. Re:Murdoch is not a technophobe by Asclepius99 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  8. Re:Read between the lines ... by ScrewMaster · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  9. A better solution by jamesh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. 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.