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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.'"
Am I genius?
The faster Rupert puts himself out of business, the better off everyone will be.
No sig for you!!
He wants to make more money by making his headlines not available to the top search engine?
It has to be political.. there has to be something going on behind the scenes here.
He's not that stupid a person.. and there's no way that someone hasn't explained to him what a robots.txt file is by now..
How has this not happened? Even mainstream media tends to at least try to get a statement from both sides.
I'm sure if the BBC had contacted google.. they would have gotten lots of information on the subject. Or at least a quote they could include.. something along the lines of "google engineer x would like to remind Newscorp that they can _completely_ "block" us (and many others) from "stealing" their content by putting a simple text file on their site.
If I were Google, I'd just cut all his sites off for a month and let them see how far their click-revenue falls off.
No google news, No search results, nothing.
The guy asked for it, so give it to him.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yes, I am sure that barring searching engines from listing your headlines will do wonders for your revenue. It's not like your competitors are allowing those results or anything like that! Everyone knows that your customers will go to your websites without any help from search engines!
As for fair use? Yeah, it's not like news websites ever make use of that doctrine.
Palm trees and 8
Worth reading Lauren Weinstein's blog post take on this - trenchantly dead-on, as usual:
Murdoch's Folly: Block Google & Kill Fair Use -- Plus a Nasty Truth
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000633.html
From the Summary: "'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.'" Fair use is the target here. They don't want anyone to ever be able to use any current culture without payment and approval.
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.
This is awesome! Now I don't have to sort through all the FoxNews crap in search results.
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
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.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Ummm, while it maybe fun to bash the "Slashtards" it was Murdoch himself who invoked the concept of Fair Use.
He's asking Google to pay him to index his site.
Parse it out...
1) They're stealing his headlines
2) Google may or may not have the right to search
3) We'll attack their right to search
4) So if they know what's good for them, pay us to be included in google searches
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Actually I think absurdist's post had it, this is all just him repeating the lie enough times that he can get his followers to back him up and then challenge fair use entirely.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
"Murdoch believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results.
Indeed, they can't, without Murdoch's permission. Lucky for Google that Murdoch grants them permission in their robots.txt.
'There's a doctrine called "fair use," which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether,'
"We"? As in the "royal we"? Challenged by who? On what grounds?
The only thing that seems to be "challenged" here is Murdoch's intellect and ethics. Well, actually, it's beyond "challenged", it's just rotten.
.....as he gets older that Rupert looks *and* acts more and more like Mr Burns. This comment will probably get me on a NewsCorp hitllist.
What else do you expect from a man in charge of a company that nearly sued itself over the one show that singlehandedly kept the network from dying an early death?
Wrong. Fair use is a defense to use when you are accused of copyright infringement. If you prove that what you did is covered by fair use, you are not guilty of infringing because Fair Use is an exception to copyright. An extenuating circumstance is something you invoke either after you are found guilty (in a criminal case) or as part of your defense in a civil case in an attempt to lower or avoid any fines, judgments or other penalties. Your basic idea is right, that Google isn't infringing, but your explanation of Fair Use was wrong and misleading. N.B.: IANAL, but I am a writer, and have had reason to familiarize myself with the concept.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Actually I think absurdist's post had it, this is all just him repeating the lie enough times that he can get his followers to back him up and then challenge fair use entirely.
Similar tactics of repeating lies until people believe them worked with the "liberal media conspiracy" and the "fox news is fair and balanced" lines, at least in some circles.
Who wants to read Murdoch's bilge anyway.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
It looks like News Corporation is already starting to "freeze" Google out. I have a newsfeed for the New York Post, a Murdoch property on my iGoogle page and the article summaries are replaced by text that reads "Information is temporarily unavailable." It's too bad, because the summaries make me more likely to click the link to the full article. As for the talk of providing News Corp. content via a subscription model - forget it. The average Joe figures he pays for his Internet access, so he expects to be able to access any content he wants. If one content provider charges a fee, dozens of other ones will line up to provide the same (or better) content for free.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
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
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 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.
In an exclusive interview with one of his employees, Rupert Murdoch announced that it was time to draw a line in the sand in his constant battle to frustrate freeloading consumers by scheduling extensive rhinoplasty.
As the logical extension of his intent to improve monetization of his global media empire, an aggressive research team, led by his own grubby, questing index finger (itself a semi-autonomous publicly traded subsidiary of ArmCorp) had discovered a hitherto unprofitable branch of Mr Murdoch's own face and immediately set to analysing the potential in the "streaming content" market.
"Thanks to the pervasive and anarchic medium of light and an endemic, unscrupulous approach to photon-consumption," said Mr Murdoch to a camera he owned, "the public have been stealing — we believe it is theft — visible spectra which carry a representation of my nose. When I consent to an interview, a TV appearance or a personal meeting with an individual, we are entering into a contract in which I am licensing access to me, Rupert Murdoch, a highly lucrative and profitable range of properties and services.
"For too long, people have been content to pay only for access to my thoughts, speech or round-the-clock footage of the contents of my bowels — via the Times, Sky and Fox News respectively — while stealing valuable images of my nose, its nostrils and their contents, then rebroadcasting and shamelessly profiteering.
"When a reporter negotiates an interview with me, as well as broadcasting the material he has licensed legitimately, he frequently steals additional content without permission. Telling another reporter down the pub 'I just interviewed that arsehole Murdoch, what a leathery-faced, jowly, big-nosed, offensive wanker he is' is time-shifting and re-disseminating unlicensed intellectual property. Commentary based upon my opinions is legitimate as paid output from the premium outlet of my mouth. Any entertainment derived from the rest of my face is theft, pure and simple. There is no such thing as fair use."
The interview itself took place on Sky Channel 149, a pioneering venture to broadcast 24-hour footage of the view from Mr Murdoch's bathroom cabinet. In line with Mr Murdoch's policy of preferring fewer paying customers and no freeloaders, Sky 149 has precisely one subcriber, with Mr Murdoch himself paying himself hundreds of thousands of dollars each month for access, for the purpose of shaving.
Having successfully franchised out his forehead, jowls and cheeks to a conglomerate representing elephants born without ball-bags, and following a failed attempt to charge a subscription fee to customers prepared to pay to punch Murdoch square in the nose, the decision was eventually made to excise the entire section of the business, rather than allow further illicit exploitation, piracy and copyright terrorism.
When questioned as to what purpose the resulting gap in his cranial portfolio might be turned, Murdoch suggested that he was tentatively considering offers from the adult entertainment market to employ his skull cavity as a giant fucking cunt.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
it's human readable-you won't believe this shit....
http://www.foxnews.com/robots.txt
"User-agent: * /printer_friendly_story /projects/livestream /printer_friendly_story /google_search_index.xml /google_news_index.xml /*.xml.gz
Disallow:
Disallow:
#
User-agent: gsa-crawler
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml"
explicit allows.....
I often find disallows to be the neatest part of some websites.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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!
The problem is, nobody is paying anyone for the news today. So there will be no "good journalists" in the future because nobody is going to waste their time doing that job for nothing.
If your current career paid you zero dollars, would you keep doing it out of loyalty? I know some teachers might. Except they need to pay the rent, buy food, etc. So no matter how dedicated they are, they are going to spend their hours doing something that pays for rent, food. etc.
The "new media" consists of reading stuff written by people that are driven to write it by their own ego. So you get terrific articles that are written by dedicated people... except they are utterly the product of one person's delusions about the world. This isn't news or journalism, it is like finding someone making a speech in a public park.
As some other folks have said, nobody is every going to pay again. Or at least not in our lifetimes. It is expected to just all be free because it is on the Internet. So instead of news we are going to have blogs and ranting.
But I'd hazard that he knows just how many eyes google directs to his sites.
Instead, I'd suggest he doesn't like how efficient google's algorithm is. I generally get what I'm after with google. I'm guessing he wants to be able to directly control what a search on his sites turn up, relevant or not.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
I believe hoarding is hardwired into the system. Highly irrational in today's times of plenty, but controlling genetic impulses seems to be beyond his abilities. Great! Let's take the law to its next level of absurdity. SNAFU
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I work for someone who is wealthy enough to just plain stop, right now, and live happily ever after. He easily works 60 hours a week at the office, and probably more if he takes anything home with him. We've talked about the quandary you just presented.
His answer as to why he continues to build and expand: "Because I really enjoy it." And I don't think there's much more to be said about it, except that some folks like playing football, or billiards. Some folks paint pictures for fun. And some folks build empires. It's like playing Risk, but with real assets.
Kid-proof tablet..
Here is another article that goes into a little more detail.
The crux of the matter seems to be the fact "readers who randomly reach a page via an internet search hold little value to advertisers." Apparently advertisers want to know some demographic details about the people who read the articles, details that are available with paying subscribers. "Who knows who they are or where they are. They don't suddenly become loyal readers of our content." states Mr. Murdoch of Google news click-throughs.
Mr. Murdoch also claims that there is simply not enough advertising money in the world to make all news websites profitable. He realises that the number of visitors will decrease, but states that he would prefer to have fewer readers who pay to many readers who don't.
should join Google and DROP ALL OF MURDOCH'S COMPANIES. Let him know what a day without Search Engines would be like.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I work for someone who is wealthy enough to just plain stop, right now, and live happily ever after. He easily works 60 hours a week at the office, and probably more if he takes anything home with him. We've talked about the quandary you just presented.
His answer as to why he continues to build and expand: "Because I really enjoy it." And I don't think there's much more to be said about it, except that some folks like playing football, or billiards. Some folks paint pictures for fun. And some folks build empires. It's like playing Risk, but with real assets.
Is this person generally a good or at least decent man? Or is he a despotic, ruthless, Machiavellian type like (in my opinion) Murdoch is? I believe that makes a significant difference. I don't imagine Murdoch truly rejoicing in much of anything to tell you the truth. He probably views his personal enjoyment as something he had to sacrifice to a) get where he is today and b) demonstrate his single-minded dedication. If you have ever encountered the type before, then you know what I mean.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I work for someone who is wealthy enough to just plain stop, right now, and live happily ever after. He easily works 60 hours a week at the office, and probably more if he takes anything home with him. We've talked about the quandary you just presented.
His answer as to why he continues to build and expand: "Because I really enjoy it." And I don't think there's much more to be said about it, except that some folks like playing football, or billiards. Some folks paint pictures for fun. And some folks build empires. It's like playing Risk, but with real assets.
I know I'm replying to you a second time, but I wanted to add something.
I guess I am one of those "oddballs" (at least in this society it would seem so) because I value quality time with people I love and care about much more than any game of Risk that I don't actually need to play. What follows is a rhetorical question. If your boss has a family, how often does he say "I just don't have the time" to his wife and children in order to put in those 60+ hours a week, or if he doesn't have his own family, how many people hear that from him who still care about him very much?
To me this is not about whether working a job that you enjoy has merit. Certainly it does. It's about priorities and whether you have any that mean more to you. It's about the fact that there are only so many hours in one day and only so many days in one lifetime.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
"There's a doctrine called 'fair use', which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether... But we'll take that slowly."
That's pretty much the definition of FUD. "We can and will destroy you, but we choose not to for now." A.k.a. "bullshit".
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
One word: sociopath.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Who but a bunch of racist old assholes is going to miss it in their news results?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
I guess this is what is was like watching the last few mastodons lumbering off a cliff, confident there was food at the bottom.
Did anyone pay for tv news ten years ago?
Just because the consumer doesn't pay at the point of purchase doesn't mean it's impossible to make money from it.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
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.
Maybe if Google would simply remove all references to anything Murdoch from the search engine, then all of the Murdoch sites would simply dry up and blow away.
I doubt if Murdoch wants to block Google's access at all (he'd need a morons.txt file instead). He wants them to pay: this would give the hit-count of a free-access google-indexed site (preserving advertising rates), but the direct revenue per view of a paywalled site.
/printer_friendly_story /projects/livestream /printer_friendly_story /google_search_index.xml /google_news_index.xml /*.xml.gz
His web admins and business managers probably understand robots.txt quite well, and have made it consistent with their business intentions. Just for giggles, here is the robots.txt from Fox News:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
#
User-agent: gsa-crawler
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml
Note that there are entries explicitly allowing the Google indexers...
FWIW, that's the first time in years that I've looked at anything at a fox site.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I've said it before, and I'll say it again.
It's time for the hackers/crackers of the world to unite and give Murdoch what he wants: A robots.txt that stops googlebot from indexing anything on News Corps servers.
There are several advantages to this:
1) Murdoch gets what he says he wants, free of charge
2) Google gets to show the world, just how effective they are at driving traffic
3) We, the people, get to pull a Nelson on Murdoch
4) The crackers/hackers who pull it off, get to show that they're doing good work