Monday, November 9th, 2009 -- 10:01 am
Rupert Murdoch was hailed as an old-media pioneer when he bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005. While the new media social networking site has fallen behind its peers, its still made back more than the purchase price for Murdoch's News Corporation empire.
Now Rupert Murdoch has a new approach to the Web: Screw you.
In an interview with Australian television, the cantankerous chairman of News Corporation -- which owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post -- said that he was considering blocking Google searches of his content.
Asked why the company hadn't chosen to remove its news stories from Google's index after creating a pay-for-content operation (the Journal charges for some articles), Murdoch explained, "I think we will, but that's when we start charging," he said. "We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it's not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story - but if you're not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form."
"There's a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether," he added. "But we'll take that slowly."
The company has routinely lambasted Google News for "stealing" content, by allowing excerpts of articles on its pages and including a link to the story.
"The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories - they just take them," the 78-year-old Australian said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... they shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7GkJqRv3BI"]YouTube- Sky News - Interview with Rupert Murdoch[/ame]
http://rawstory.com/2009/11/fox-news-chairman-block-google-searches/
Rupert Murdoch was hailed as an old-media pioneer when he bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005. While the new media social networking site has fallen behind its peers, its still made back more than the purchase price for Murdoch's News Corporation empire.
Now Rupert Murdoch has a new approach to the Web: Screw you.
In an interview with Australian television, the cantankerous chairman of News Corporation -- which owns Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post -- said that he was considering blocking Google searches of his content.
Asked why the company hadn't chosen to remove its news stories from Google's index after creating a pay-for-content operation (the Journal charges for some articles), Murdoch explained, "I think we will, but that's when we start charging," he said. "We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it's not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story - but if you're not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form."
"There's a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether," he added. "But we'll take that slowly."
The company has routinely lambasted Google News for "stealing" content, by allowing excerpts of articles on its pages and including a link to the story.
"The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories - they just take them," the 78-year-old Australian said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... they shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7GkJqRv3BI"]YouTube- Sky News - Interview with Rupert Murdoch[/ame]
http://rawstory.com/2009/11/fox-news-chairman-block-google-searches/
