Murdoch: News Corp. May Block Google From Searching Newspaper Content

[villager]

Source: Barrons

News Corp. May Block Google From Searching Newspaper Content


By Eric Savitz

News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch said the company will eventually remove stories from Google’s (GOOG) search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online, according to a story in the Guardian, which apparently was based on an interview Murdoch did with Sky News Australia.

News Corp. publishes The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, the New York Post, the Sun, among other newspapers. (As well as this blog.)

Murdoch said in the interview that the company could eventually remove its sites from Google indexes once it starts charging for additional publications online. The company already charges subscription fees for the WSJ and for Barron’s, but stories for both publications are being indexed by Google.

“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.”

As the Guardian notes, WSJ.com articles found via Google searches are typically provided in full.

“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,” Murdoch reportedly 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.”

<snip>



Read more: http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2009/11/09/news-corp-may-block-google-from-searching-newspaper-content/

[MineralMan]

1. Murdoch:' We'll show you! We'll marginalize our publications.'

"So there!"

[ixion]

2. LOL @ News Corp

"We'll show you! We're gonna charge for our content and not let the search engines index it!"

...

:rofl:

Epic Fail.

[begin_within]

3. Frankly I'm glad someone is fighting back against Google.

I don't like the fact that that they take the entire contents of my site and put it on their servers, so that people can read my copyrighted material just by going to Google and never coming to my site. In my opinion they should only allow the visitor to see the text that matched their search string and not view the entire page it was found on. Google is making money from the ads on its search return pages and therefore is making money off my copyrighted material without any compensation to me. In my opinion Google and other search engines who do the same thing are way, way overstepping their mission, and are in the business of duplicating copyrighted content and making it available on their own servers. In the normal world this is called piracy.

[thunder rising]

7. Right, and the world was slamming your servers until Google stole your content. robots.txt?

[guyton]

10. you can block them

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

[begin_within]

20. Yes, but I want them to read the meta tags on my pages but not copy the entire body contents.

[thunder rising]

4. I say don't even take the first paragraph .. then they don't exist at all. That's a winner!

[Speck Tater]

5. Murdoch has figured out how to make himself irrelevant. nt

[Vincardog]

18. Murdoch has figured out how to make himself EVEN MORE irrelevant. nt

[leveymg]

6. There's a reason why the WSJ was going bust when Murdoch bought it, and

it didn't have anything to do with GOOGLE. It sure as hell isn't making Newscorp much money now.

The reason he picked it up is that WSJ offers a great opportunity to shape attitudes of investors and other conservative elites. Murdoch is just a front man for the Saudis, and they have so much money they can afford to subsidize his publications.

[guyton]

8. can't happen soon enough

I'm still trying to figure out how to block Faux news from my customized news.google.com.

For some crazy reason, google treats them like they're a news source!

[hunter]

9. "If I don't get my way I'll hold my breath until I die!" -- Murdoch

Good-bye, Murdoch.

As your slow boat departs for hell we'll be standing on the dock laughing at you.

[ananda]

11. My question.

Why would anyone want to read a Murdoch source at any time,
free or charged for it?????

[fascisthunter]

12. Murdoch: "I must control EVERYZING!"

[Turborama]

13. Wow, that's good news

I'm glad that he's purposefully reducing his readership and the possibility of his 'news' popping up in search results for articles.

[HopeHoops]

14. Fine with me - keeps their propaganda out of my search results!

[TygrBright]

15. Yer ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, Rupy-- Yer face WILL look better without the nose.

Go ahead and cut.

amusedly,
Bright

[madrchsod]

16. remember...this guy paid a boat load of money for myspace.....

opps! :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[JDPriestly]

17. So, some blogger will subscribe and then editorialize on the WSJ

articles without attribution: Some say . . . . . will come back to haunt Rupert Murdoch.

Does he really think that people will buy access to his newspapers just because he tries to force them to do it. Fewer and fewer people are following the stock market's ups and downs on the pages of the WSJ. People now read the news stories (which are available elsewhere for the most part) and the editorials (which are of questionable value, however controversial). I have lived without the WSJ for many years now and will continue to do so.

Actually, at this time, I do not subscribe to any newspaper or cable TV. I got sick of the cost and the slanted news coverage. I don't need them. I don't need Rupert Murdoch's trashy newspapers.

[BadgerKid]

19. Google ALREADY makes web crawling optional.

Google follows web standards that allow the target web site to place a file (robots.txt) telling it what it can or cannot index.

Murdoch is surely stomping his feet.

[villager]

21. interesting... so news about media isn't news, but "media..."

Kind of speaks to the difficulty of "finding things" online without a good search function....

[insidejoke]

22. You Know, According to Long Celebrated US Common Law...

...you have no copyright in the information held in most news stories (even when those news stories are reprinted verbatim) and the original publishers only have a limited proprietary interest in the news.

Thus, according to the leading US Supreme Court opinion on the matter (Associated Press v. International News Service (1918)), you no longer have any rights in your news once it ceases to be "hot" news.

That said, why doesn't someone who knows how to do these sorts of things make a free website that reports (verbatim) all the news stories News Corp publishes but, ya know, waits until those stories are no longer "hot". Maybe a day later. A week at MOST...

[zbdent]

23. Well, after News Corp. blocked factual reporting from its content ...