Posted on Evans Politics, November 23, 2009, by Paul Evans
Back on November 16th, Evans Politics reported on a Boing Boing article, "Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp’s websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals," with a 37 minute Sky News interview with Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch was claiming Google was stealing from him, and that he was going to remove all of News Corp's content from Google and charge for access to his sites. He was also warning that 'Fair Use,' whereby portions of an online posting are quoted on another site, with reference to the source, is illegal and that he was going to take it to court and have it "barred altogether."
It's ominous folks. According to today's Reuters Report, carried on the New York Times:
Sources: Microsoft and Murdoch's News Corp Eye Web Pact, Financial Times, November 22, 2009, by Matthew Garrahan, Richard Waters and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson; Microsoft Offers To Pay News Corp To "De-List" Itself From Google (MSFT, NWS, GOOG), Silicon Valley Insider, November 22, 2009, by Nicholas Carlson; Microsoft, News Corp Weigh Web Pact: Source, Reuters on The New York Times, November 23, 2009, by Reuters; and "Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp’s websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals", Evans Politics, November 16, 2009, here, with source from Boing Boing, November 8, 2009 and Sky News video of Murdoch's threat.
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'Fair Use' also threatened
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp has had talks with News Corp about a tie up, which would involve News Corp getting paid to take its news websites off Google Inc, a source familiar with the matter said on Sunday.
News Corp, which owns such papers as the Wall Street Journal and the Sun, started the discussions, which were at an early stage, the source said.
News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch has said he wants to make people pay for access to his news websites. Other publishers including The New York Times are also searching for ways to charge for news online, convinced that they must not give news through search engines such as Google and Yahoo Inc.
Microsoft has also talked with other online publishers about removing their sites from Google, according to the Financial Times, which first reported the development.
For Microsoft, this is about promoting it's newish search engine, Bing, and hurting Google's profit margin. According to the Financial Times, "Bing accounted for 9.9 per cent of searches in the US in October, up from 8.4 per cent at its launch, according to ComScore." CNN Money on November 17th reported, that Google's search share is now up to 65.4 percent of all searches.
View the Sky News interview with Rupert Murdoch and his threats about search engines and fair use, here. We have said before that old line, established news sources with big operations and overhead, don't want to allow the free dissemination of their news. They view it as a commodity, something to be bought and sold.
It's not just News Corp, either, with Microsoft seeking to sign other media giants into it's exclusive club and even the New York Times being singled out. As for 'fair use,' Associated Press earlier made an assault on that, and now Murdoch has put his greedy little brain onto the idea he can stop that and prevent the republication of what has always been thought of as free on the web: information.
Let me just say: if fair use goes overboard, the internet as a free source of real information that is outside the mainstream media and extremely useful to the public in finding out "the truth" about what goes on in government and business -- would be over, done.
The Silicon Valley Insider (Business Insider) reports that "the FT reports that 'Google’s UK director Matt Brittin told a conference last week that Google did not need news content to survive.
"'Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue,' he said."
The Business insider also said that, "we can't imagine links to worthwhile stories originating from News Corp not finding their way onto sites that will happily remain indexed in Google's search engine free of charge." But that's precisely what the Associated Press has legally attacked in the past, and now Murdoch is on board with a probable further assault on fair use. It was reported earlier that the Associated Press had even engaged in litigation where simple links to its articles were the subject of lawsuits when the link did not exactly replicate the AP news article title.
Evans Politics views this as an encroachment on free speech and a threat to the news consumer's ability to find out the truth. Limit information, channel it, restrict it, make you pay for it ... and the ability of the public to "know the truth" is threatened. Independent news sources and blogs would be severely restricted and their ability to find legally publishable fact and content, (especially about the right wing, where Murdoch's News Corp has major many major news holdings), would be difficult to manage. This is a bad portent for the future of the internet. That's our view, why not leave a comment and let us know how you feel about the two 1000 pound gorillas (Microsoft and News Corp) and their new threat to internet news.