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October 12, 2009
In his speech at the World Media Summit, Beijing, China Rupert Murdoch showed that he did not understand the internet. In it he said:
Too often the conventional media response to the internet has been inchoate. A medium once thought too powerful has often seemed impotent in the past few years. Of course there should be a price paid for quality content, and yet large media organizations have been submissive in the face of the flat-earthers who insisted that all content should be free all the time. The sun does not orbit the earth, and yet this was precisely the premise that the press passively accepted, even though there have been obvious signs that readers recognize the reality that they should pay a price.
Flat earthers? Doesn't News Ltd use Google for free? Aren't there people already paying for good content at the Wall Street Journal? I cannot see the point that Murdoch is trying to make with the analogy to flat earthers. Murdoch continues:
There are many readers who believe that they are paying for content when they sign up with an internet service provider, presuming that they have bought a ticket to a content buffet. That misconception thrived on the silence of inarticulate institutions which were unable to challenge the fallacies and humbug of the e-establishment...The Philistine phase of the digital age is almost over. The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph.
When I signed up to an ISP I was under no illusions that I had bought a ticket to a content buffet. I was far more interested in publishing my own content/commentary.
Now that makes me a plagarist co-opting News Ltd content in Murdoch's eyes. Don't the reporters at News Ltd rip off bloggers and photographers and other journos without explicit permission, or without even bothering to link to them? Oh, stealing copy from rivals is seen as accepted fair use.
Of course Murdoch's real target is Google and Yahoo, not the bloggers, as it is the former who challenges his power. Now news.google.com gives a headline which is linked to the original article, two or three lines quoted followed by more direct links to the article. So it refers readers back to Murdoch's newspapers. So Murdoch both wants the traffic from Google and for Google to pay him. Google has no reason to do so and they are powerful enough to resist Murdoch's demands to pay up. Murdoch wants a share of Google's income stream.
Shouldn't Murdoch be paying Google for carrying the index of the stories in the first place?
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Murdoch and company seem incapable of grasping the fact that people aren't interested in paying for their content because their content is rubbish. There are 50 online writers, none employed by a major media company, who I would read and often do read before I would consider reading anything written by the partisan hacks at News Limited. In fact I've pretty much stopped reading Larvatus Prodeo because of the number of "Look what Shanahan/Sheridan/Milne or whoever has written now" posts. I mean who cares what they write? Their pretensions to being serious journalists and commentators have been blown out of the water by the sheer weight of quality content that is available for free, and likely to remain that way.