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Murdoch To Explore Blocking Google Searches
In another move sure to continue the certain doom looming over classic publications, Rupert Murdoch has elaborated on the direction he would take in an effort to monetize the content that his websites deliver by attempting to block much of Google's ability to scan and index his news sites. "Murdoch believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results. 'There's a doctrine called "fair use," which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether,' Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. 'But we'll take that slowly.'"
There's a department store. It probably carries a lot of merchandise. But the store owner wants everybody to pay him a fee to walk through the front door. And he wants the local papers to not say what he carries, or what he's got on sale this week. He feels that he should be the only one getting paid for anything that mentions his merchandise.
Would you bother going to his store? Or would you go to the Target or Wal-Mart that's happy to have a flyer in the paper listing everything they've got on sale this week.
Yeah, thought so.
It's your right to be stupid and wrong-headed, Mr. Murdoch. Everyone has that gods-given right. But don't come whining to us when your plan fails to go the way you want it to go. We, after all, never signed any agreement saying we'd only behave the way you want.
FoxNews seems to dominate my personalized headlines at news.google.com, even when the story is highly irrelevant or a tangent to the topic on hand.
I'd love to be able to block Fox News. I'd also like to block all the Sports news that keeps creeping into my newsfeeds, despite my attempts to prevent it. I'm not interested in Sports news.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Easy solution for Google.
1. Block any and all direct links to Newscorp owned sites in the search results.
2. Downrank any sites that link to Newscorp owned sites as irrelevant linking. (They have this for counteracting googlebombing.)
3. Systematically provide alternative sources for any search results that would have linked to Newscorp owned sites.
.
So eventually even a search for "Newscorp" brings up every one of their competitors websites bashing them for being stupid, old, ignorant and irrelevant.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
I wonder if Google could argue that by not using robots.txt, Murdoch had essentially given permission to have his sites searched and indexed. Or, more likely, his sites probably do use a robots.txt file, but only forbid searching certain sections (ie, archives where nothing changes, therefore no reason to waste bandwidth), in which case the appearance that permission was granted would be much more compelling.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I agree with your take on this, but what I don't get is how Murdoch is able to continue in this campaign.
It seems to me that he is damaging his reputation and the reputation of his companies with all the press this idea is generating. Does he not have advisors that he consults with before making these press releases? ...I wonder if he just fires anyone who attempts to talk him out of it? The whole thing seems starkly suicidal. Who would invest in such an idea? Are there actually people who believe it can work?
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
If my local paper offered a good online subscription I would sign up. What I want to see is:
In fact, pretty much what I can get from /. right now. All of that should be easy to implement. They just need to open their eyes and look around.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml
Murdoch is so intent on blocking Google News that his site automatically generates the feed necessary for the import.
Wait.. I think I missed something.
If you want to be seen, stand up. If you want to be heard, speak up. If you want to be respected, sit down and shut up.
I think they are trying to separate themselves to state that if you want the news, come to us and do it properly.
Riiighhht. When I want news done properly, I'll PAY FoxNews to do it properly. Just think about that for a second. The only reason anyone should be remotely concerned about this is because he now controls the WSJ.
Have you ever searched for some information, and Google gave a hit where the surrounding text of the query already answers your question? And then not clicked the website?
No, not for news. Try searching for "2009 election results" or "apple earnings 2009" and see if you can make sense of it (although "who beat rihanna" actually kind of worked). Nobody can use that crap. Even Google News doesn't provide usable news in their largest digest. FoxNews.com charging would be fun to watch, glad to see them go first.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
And murdoch's news.com.au's robots.txt file even directs bots to the sitemap!
/*comments/* /*print/* /*email/* /*SIT* /*.swf /printpage/
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow: */404*
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.news.com.au/perthnow-sitemap.xml
This is all a ploy to negotiate with Google some more beneficial (to Murdoch) terms. I can only see it working if he also manages to get a critical mass of other publications' owners to do the same thing. They don't have to move in lockstep if he does have a coalition going. He can block WSJ.com, claim some victory, show it as a case model, and hope others buy his idea (WSJ does not need Google, but the example would probably not work for many other not-as-self-sustaining sites).
It's not politics, it's purely (an attempt to save a failed) business (model). If Rupert doesn't have a coalition going, there's only so much posturing he can do before actually cutting off his nose to spite his face.
Here's what I don't understand about people like Murdoch. He's 78 years old. I don't like him one bit, but I don't wish him ill either (for that would reflect badly on me while saying nothing about him). I hope he lives well into old age (and uses that time to reconsider his priorities -- more on that later). But realistically, he is a mortal being just like me and everyone else.
I'll speak only for myself here. If I were 78 years old, how much time would I have left on the planet? Two or three years? Five? Ten? Wouldn't I be lucky to have that much, since all of those figures exceed the average life expectancy of a male in the USA? If I am that old and already have enough money to guarantee not only my financial security but also that of any children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, what would be the point of continuing to try to build and maintain a media empire with increasingly aggressive tactics? Every minute I spent doing that would be time I wouldn't get to spend with my family, my friends, appreciating nature and the world around me, and maybe even trying to use my vast resources to make the world a slightly better place. It would be time that I would never get back once it has come and gone.
I really wonder what drives people like this. I want to know what they think they are accomplishing that's so important to them. It's not even a religious cause or a humanitarian effort or anything like that where this kind of devotion is not so unusual. It's just business and he has already acquired a vast personal fortune that is the dream of businessmen everywhere. He has already succeeded many times over yet he continues to play the game. Something here just doesn't add up. How do you explain this kind of dedication? Because as far as I can tell, it's quite pathological though even that doesn't really explain it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Why not? What part of "hey, not only is this completely within your control, it's also easy to handle" would a billionaire not want to hear? Would they prefer to hear that there's nothing they can do or that the problem is incredibly difficult to solve? Please explain this because I don't get it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I would be willing to bet that most people do not know about bookmarks, and just search Google (or whatever their favorite search engine is) whenever they want to go to a website. There is probably a significant percentage of people who enter domain names into Google when they want to visit the website at that domain.
Palm trees and 8
> I wonder if Google could argue that by not using robots.txt, Murdoch had
> essentially given permission to have his sites searched and indexed.
I believe that in the US case law has established that Murdoch has given permission to have his sites searched and indexed by making them public. Obeying robots.txt is just a courtesy, but the fact that he has not used it to block Google totally destroys any feeble case he might have had.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I had the pleasure of cycling for about 4 hours with on of the editors from a large Murdoch owned newspaper back in 2000.
He asked me where the internet was heading, and how they could leverage it to provide content, and get the readers involved. I also highlighted problems like the sourcing of press releases as articles and the conflicting information they will find in other sources. Opportunities also would present themselves like geolocated and profiled advertising. To their credit, they have persued much of this. The problem is that Google is their competition. I can find anything I want, for free, quicker, crowdsourced, discussed in forums and critiqued. The only service newspapers now offer is a stream of aggregation - and that puts them in direct competition with search engines.
This has been a perfect storm for Murdoch. He has concernrated media, driving variety out of the the market, and opening doors for players of new technology to enter into a niche and then expand to take his business.
His papers will evaporate. Unfortunately, with it will go the newsagencies, delivery routes and old paper advertising industry that went with it. The biggest danger Rupert faces is Apple Tablet - if you can read on that, and it works well - newpapers are in for a world of pain.
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
Murdoch would sue. More likely, Fox would sue, whining that Google is discriminating against a conservative viewpoint.
No, what would make more sense is, with each of these articles, publicly respond -- in particular, contact whatever organization published the Murdoch rant. Make two offers:
First, offer to that news organization that a representative will be available for comment every time Murdoch does this. This isn't a big deal, as it'll pretty much be cut and paste.
Second, in this response and in all further comments, make the public offer to do exactly what he is asking for -- stop indexing his stuff. If he says "no", end of story. If he doesn't respond, he's going to look very stupid in future articles like this.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Really. Of course he knows. He just wants a cut of Google's pie.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
I was thinking about power law distributions the other night, and ended up reading through some old material on Clay Shirky's blog, where I encountered the term "solidarity good": a good that primarily has value because all your peers also know about it. This is one of the factors which drives power law distributions. I mean, we all know who's the world's wealthiest self-produced amateur porn star, which is only important because we all know it.
I'm interested in another class of good which I might term "ubiquity good": something that has value primarily because you know it's pervasive and easily accessible. In software, we're trained not to succumb to the NIH factor. If you position a line of code as a scarcity good, you'll end up rewriting it every time you change jobs. In order to drive down labour cost, the powers that be have voted in favour of churn.
In our economy, most people function as wage slaves: your income is primarily determined by how many hours you have to sell. Only the ascendant sliver of the power law distribution profits from accrued capital. So you have 10% of the population controlling 90% of the wealth who are intensely invested in scarcity goods, and 90% of the population controlling 10% of the wealth who see a lot more upside in ubiquity goods. Which prevails?
Without laws to the contrary (and big government to enforce them) the answer is obvious. I wonder about this sometimes when I use Google Scholar to add a cite to a woeful Wikipedia article. I dive in, poach someone else's hard won fact/authority, jigger the wording, adjust the context, and make if free for all: a billion termites chewing away on scarcity culture, bite by bite. By comparison, the "analog gap" is a pretty small fish.
In theory, we all aspire to make the leap from the wage slave majority to the leveraged minority. The power law says most of us aren't going to make it: the number of seats at the high table seems to shrinking lately, rather than growing.
The argument boils down to one of two cases: A) we should all support scarcity culture, because we all aspire to ascend the economic ladder to the scarcity-enabled rungs of privilege, or B) we should all invest in ubiquity culture, because few of us will succeed in making the jump (as is the nature of a power law).
Power laws have a fractal structure, but scarcity doesn't seem to: for whatever reason, gated communities tend not to work; a quanta of IP tends to either be scarce or universal. Frequently the market manages to exploit aspiration over reality, but I don't see how that's going to play out in Murdoch's favour in this case. There isn't enough middle ground.
The one example of middle ground that comes to mind is stock market price data where scarcity is a function of timeliness. For the big fish, I think the goal these days is to trade on adverse information in under 4ms. The price information runs a cascade of tiers before emerging 15m later as a universal. Each tier wants to conceal the new information from the next tier down until their own trades complete, and so it goes.
Somehow Disney wants to fire the inverse-bullet-time hog-trough at this and slow the process down to the scale of human lifetimes without tipping greater society toward ubiquity goods. I can only say, good luck with that. Murdoch in the middle isn't going to fare much better.
Access to all archives
Good searching (like with a google appliance)
Revision history
Access to raw source material
Access to comment pages on all stories
In fact, pretty much what I can get from /. right now.
The thing is _they dont have it_, even internally if a reporter wants something old he usually has to go to the archive (read basement) and digg for hours. Obviously its better at big newspapers, but not by a mile (they got dedicated people that do the digging, archives are in photo form, there might even be and index). What they find is usually just a copy of old newspaper, no revision history, no raw sources. Its not like in those cop shows where someone jumps out with big fat file full of pictures and hand written notes for 30 year old case.
Newspapers are SCARED of google, not because google knows how to archive this stuff, but because google is able to monetize it.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
So, what's your social security number?
Well obviously Murdoch wants his web pages crawled, otherwise nobody will visit them.
Frankly, what he is demanding is non-sensical; he wants Google to index his news sites, but does NOT want Google to display headlines or partial text when returning results. How the hell is a searcher supposed to know that the link in question has any relevance at all to what they are looking for?
He also seems to have a pretty screwed up view of what fair use is. Fair use is not the exception to copyright, copyright is the exception to fair use. That's why copyright had to be enumerated in the first place. The fair use statutes are there to help clarify what copyright does -not- extend to, but it is intentionally left somewhat vague to make it difficult for copyright to over-step its bounds.
All of this comes from the stated goal of copyright in the copyright goal, which is to enhance the proliferation of creative arts for the betterment of society at large. It's goal is NOT to make content owners rich, that is simply the vehicle to increase the amount of creative art produced for public consumption.
So, when he says he believes fair use doctrine is on its way out, it shows that he has absolutely no understanding of what copyright is for, and that he is also one greedy som'bitch. If he is right in any way, it means our law has really been turned on its head.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I'm sure you'd agree that techies are well-benefited by understanding how a businessman thinks. Doesn't mean the techie has to agree with them.
Just for grins, I took a look at http://www.foxnews.com/robots.txt, and guess what? It specifically allows google.
What's a better reason than the actual owner of the site bitching about being indexed and quoted and so on? They wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on and the judge would dismiss it after a few sentences of reading, if he hadn't read about it previously.
Anyway, that's not the scam here, murdoch wants cash from google, and it is that simple. He can't make it from online ad revenue, he's stumped, got no clue at all, which really pisses him off being a past success and like that. It is annoying to him google can make money from ads and he can't, so he wants google to pay him for what he can't do. He knows google came up with a way to make a bundle from ad revenue, and he wants a piece of it. Just like ATT wants cash from google, even though google pays for their bandwith, and end users pay for their bandwith. ATT thinks there should be a third fee that google pays because they constitute a sum nice chunk of their traffic. Just "because" the ATT CEO hallucinated that this is his just dessert or something. No technical legal reason, just he wants a piece of google.
Newscorpse and ATT are *trolling for dollars*, that's all, based on no particular thing other than they want them and google has deep pockets.
I know it could be painful, but you have to make believe debase yourself to subhuman pure reptile brain level to grok how these predatory big phat CEOs think. One of their prime motivations is greed, pure greed outside the normal ken level greed. In their minds, if someone else has something, that is "wrong", because they should own and control everything, so therefore that other person must have stolen it from them. No matter how stupid that is, and how stupid it sounds to ordinary non predatory humans, those psychopaths who hit the top and stay there ruthlessly actually think that way and act out that way because they *believe* this way, it's a real mental sickness. It is just as real to them as anything else. Remember balmer sweating and spittle flying pounding his fist into his hand and growling about "they are taking food off my plate!"? That's just how they are.
The vast bulk of these sorts of insane human predators eventually get caught and do long jail times for crimes, but if they make it all the way to that billionaire owner class level they automatically become part of the new aristocracy class and their odd and criminal behaviors become acceptable again (to their peers, because they are all that way and it is normal at that level, and to the law, because "the law", like any other mercenary endeavor, follows the orders of that same psychopath class for the most part, because that's where their checks come from).
They think and act like rabid starving wolves all the time, that's all, just their nature. When they are small time, they get treated like common criminals, because they are, when they hit a certain size and power level, this changes officially and legally and they can get away with stuff all the time that ordinary people would get yanked for, or at least locked up for observation for, including bizarre illogical speech and threats and so on.
They will ask questions, but they don't really want an usable answer... they just want to feel as though they are a victim to forces beyond their control.
With Murdoch, you've got it backwards. He wants to be the victimising force beyond control. In this case, he knows full well he could stop google indexing his sites, any of his site administrators who did so would most likely be promptly fired. He wants to use google to promote his business and charge them for it.
I don't know what google is playing at. They could simply stop indexing his sites and Murdoch would be begging them within a month to start again. His public statements ought to be enough defence against any potential lawsuits, or would be if the law made sense. Maybe googles lawyers disagree with me, so I suppose they are justified in not doing that. Possibly they don't want the public perception of "OMG, evil monopoly!".
I just looked at the Fox News site main page and visited all their top news stories accessable from the front page.
So out of their top ten stories, nine are either pure AP stories or edited from AP stories, and one comes from the Discovery News website.
Total identifiable original Murdoch content: one hurricane graphic from a Fox organisation hurricane-tracking site (which Fox News forgot to link to).
No identifiable "Murdoch press" journalistic content.
Completing the list:
#11 was AP, #12 was credited to FoxBusiness.com (a Murdoch journalism hit! Wahey!), #13 was AP, #14 was AP, #15, finally, was a Fox News piece on the Mclaren buggy recall, with a bold FOXNEWS logo and a photo provided by Mclaren. #16 was AP.
So from their "most read" list, Fox News only have one story out of the sixteen that they actually wrote themselves.
Associated Press are a news syndication company (like Reuters), who supply news content to media outlets. This lets news companies supplement the content produced by their own journalists with ready-made stories that they can just slot into place as padding.
Given that the clear majority of FoxNews' top stories on this page (nearly 90%) were actually bought in from AP, and that Google News also subscribe to AP as a content provider to buy stories, it's not surprising that when both sites rank their content by popularity, if Murdoch looks at the Sky News page and compares it to the Google News page, he's going to see a lot of the same top-ranking stories on both sites.
But this doesn't necessarily mean that Google News are stealing stories from Fox News Journalists, or stealing the selection. Both sites are buying content from AP, and the site viewers are dictating the popularities, not the editors.
I don't know whether this means that FoxNews.com don't actually do much journalism themselves, and mainly act as aggregators (like Google News) ... or whether it means that they /do/ do a fair bit of journalism, but that their readership simply prefers the AP material that can be gotten from Google News anyway.
Either way, I can see why RM is concerned. Shouting that Google is stealing their stories kinda stops people noticing that, for Fox News, their own site statistics say that most of their most popular stories aren't actually theirs anyway. One out of sixteen?
Eric Baird
Not if he's asking them NOT to carry his news. Fox wasn't going around telling the cable cos "Don't carry our news channel!" You can't go around asking someone to do (or stop doing) something, and then complain when they comply with your wishes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel
If Murdoch sues to prevent google from indexing any of his content because such indexing is injurious to him, he is estoppeled from making a contrary claim that he is somehow injured when google does stop indexing.
Why do you think Murdoch hasn't sent a Cease & Desist? The moment he does, he can no longer claim any damages if google blocks him off.
Why doesn't Murdoch just have all his sites based ENTIRELY on Flash or Java? To my knowledge Google or any other search engine can't index the displayed results of either of those very well.
The news I find worth reading is not on blogs.
For some reason, the journalists that spend time and effort researching the crap that companies and governments do aren't blogging about it. I wonder why?
I don't care about someone's holiday or cat or car accident, etc. I want to know about things that affect my life and blog contents do not fit that bill.
Over time, information will tend towards dissemination
What, so does nature abhor a vacuum or not? I'm so confused!
Absolutely!!! I think ALL search engines should specifically BLOCK all of Murcoch's web sites... everything including personal sites. There is no law that says that they HAVE to include anything...
Logic is the beginning of reason, not the end of it.