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WHY MURDOCH AND AP ARE FULL OF IT
Weston Kosova, Newsweek - The executives who run big, ailing news organizations-in particular Tom Curley of AP and News Corp's Rupert Murdoch-complain every chance they get that search engines-in particular Google-are stealing from them, because Google links to their stories but doesn't pay the AP or News Corp. to do so. . . At a meeting of media executives going on this week in Beijing, Murdoch and Curley gave impassioned speeches, saying they're mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore. They warn that aggregators like Google had better start paying up, or else. . .
"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content," Murdoch said. "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."
Of course, that's not even close to true. Curley and Murdoch's macho outrage is calculated to be quotable, but it is fake. . .
Instead of stealing, I would call this something else: a free service that drives lots of readers to news Web sites that wouldn't get nearly as much traffic, if any at all, if Google didn't link to their sites for free. That may not be as pithy as crying "thief!" But it has the advantage of being true.
Murdoch and Curley know this. How do we know they know? Because if they really thought Google was stealing from them, and if they really wanted Google to stop driving all those readers to their Web sites at no charge, they would simply stop Google from linking to their news stories.
Google doesn't force Web sites to be included in its search listings. The people who run any site can remove it from Google's results with a few keystrokes. . .
It's not like this is some big secret. Google even has a page on its Web site explaining step by step how to do it. Yet neither AP nor News Corp. has taken this simple step to stop the marauding Google pirates from pillaging their cargo. Why? Because they know that their traffic would dry up overnight. They'd rather blame someone else for their failure to compete in a changing marketplace. They happily take all the customers Google sends them for free, and then accuse Google of theft. Classy.
"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content," Murdoch said. "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."
Of course, that's not even close to true. Curley and Murdoch's macho outrage is calculated to be quotable, but it is fake. . .
Instead of stealing, I would call this something else: a free service that drives lots of readers to news Web sites that wouldn't get nearly as much traffic, if any at all, if Google didn't link to their sites for free. That may not be as pithy as crying "thief!" But it has the advantage of being true.
Murdoch and Curley know this. How do we know they know? Because if they really thought Google was stealing from them, and if they really wanted Google to stop driving all those readers to their Web sites at no charge, they would simply stop Google from linking to their news stories.
Google doesn't force Web sites to be included in its search listings. The people who run any site can remove it from Google's results with a few keystrokes. . .
It's not like this is some big secret. Google even has a page on its Web site explaining step by step how to do it. Yet neither AP nor News Corp. has taken this simple step to stop the marauding Google pirates from pillaging their cargo. Why? Because they know that their traffic would dry up overnight. They'd rather blame someone else for their failure to compete in a changing marketplace. They happily take all the customers Google sends them for free, and then accuse Google of theft. Classy.
4 Comments:
My bet on what this is? Murdoch wants to take a marginal piece of Googles ad revenue. It's flawed logic that the music industry works under (suing cover band or bars unlicensed to play music. Suing Girl Scouts for singing happy birthday) that there is no such thing as free promotion. Murdoch wants to capture some revenue most likely by lawsuit and his posturing in the media is intended to soften up the people who will consider his future case.
Resolution by law suit would be difficult. In most states people can travel over private land unless no trespassing signs are visible.
The robots.txt file is the net equivalent of a "no trespassing sign." Google and other search engines generally abide by this, so Murdoch and AP have no reasonable complaint. I suspect are unlikely to prevail in court, as their demands are counter to the prevailing practice and culture of the Web.
Let us not forget that AP tried to demand copyright payments for the use of any string of five or more words that were found in one of their stories. I believe that these novel demands are sheer extortion. AP would also have to pay for any string of five or more words words that someone else had used. Because it is nearly impossible to write meaningful five word strings that no one else has used, AP would be required to pay hundreds, if not thousands, of others for a 500 word story.
The time required to research the owners of each five word string, and come to contractual agreement for use, would mean that no story could be published before it was ever so stale.
In my view such blatherings are nothing but corporate thugishness. The only chance that the complainers have is by buying legislators to create such law.
You'll notice all states have laws requiring automobile liability insurance (which resulted in the lovely practice of every idiot tailgating constantly so as not to hit anyone else from behind). Now the health reform fraud apparently will require poor people to buy what they would be given in a civilised society. The Supreme Court says artificial contrivances whose sole requirement is profit are citizens with constitutional rights and corporate rape of the electoral process is free speech. Do you seriously doubt where the courts will come down on copyright law?
Rupert Murdoch is also a hypocrite. When I researched the economics of bootleg anime stream aggregators, I found that at one, 500+ streams were hosted at 20th Century Fox domains MySpaceCDN and MySpace - against 100 for the next most common host.
The series I focused on were the ones that are in direct competition with licensed online streams, including Murdoch's own joint venture Hulu.com.
At bit.ly/k7P6p I ask (inside a radical politics wrapper - it is for posting at the Daily Kos) whether Rupert is picking the pocket of his Hulu.com partners or NewsCorp is just an old media dinosaur that is just too slow to avoid hosting bootleg streams in direct competition against its own ad-supported content - and adopt the second as my tentative working hypothesis.
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