
Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content. So Why Doesn't He Stop Them? - mjfern
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/techtonicshifts/archive/2009/10/09/rupert-murdoch-says-google-is-stealing-his-content-so-why-doesn-t-he-stop-them.aspx
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ramanujan
The obvious problem here is that there is an oversupply of news.

In an age of electronic worldwide distribution, do you need 938 outlets
reprinting the exact same story? No. But that's what you see on Google News.

Oversupply means that weeding has to happen. Those outlets that survive will
be those that provide unique information (either local news, infotainment, or
big budget national/international news).

The newspaper as an institution is no more sacred than the Broadway play
(which was destroyed by movies) or the family farm (which was automated and
scaled up).

The only reason many people believe it is somehow different is that a
significant fraction of what they read is written by newspaper writers (as
opposed to, say, playwrights or farmers).

~~~
timwiseman
You have a good analogy, but the you take it a little too far. Broadway plays
have hardly died. From what I hear, they are doing relatively well, and I have
watched a number of them as they left broadway and toured into my city at the
time. They have fallen somewhat in prominence though.

Similarly, family farms have lost their former prominence in society, but they
are far from dead. My grandparents ran one until my grandfather retired due to
health problems (recently deceased), and even then they leased their land to
another family farm nearby.

There will be a winnowing in journalism, but this does not mean destruction
for any of news, plays, or family farms.

~~~
ramanujan
Well, by "destruction" what I mean is that

1) In 1850 55% of Americans listed their occupation as farmer or farm laborer.
Now it's about 1%. Source here:

<http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/job_voyager>

2) Regarding plays (Broadway and elsewhere), they've died in the sense that
they represent a much smaller fraction of the entertainment dollar relative to
movies.

~~~
timwiseman
Percentage wise those have both died and you make valid points, but that is
hardly death in a true sense. Family farms are still alive and well in many
places in America, as are plays, they are just smaller percentages than in the
past.

~~~
sireat
The general consensus is that a successful small family farm is a very rare
and dying breed. See: <http://www.methlandbook.com/>

Would be interesting to see counterexamples, that is some small family farms
that are doing good.

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bshep
Google could simply remove them from their index for a week, see if a 25%
decrease in traffic for a month will make them think twice.

I bet that they would change their tune by the the 3rd day and beg google to
re-add them.

EDIT: Also as someone said further down, google could even charge for their
indexing of the news, IMO they are providing a service to the news companies.

~~~
quizbiz
Should Google be able to do that without consequence? I guess they don't
because we would go over to Bing.

~~~
bshep
In theory this is akin to holding someone hostage, but isnt this what the
media companies want? I doubt google would ever pay to license the links so
the only other option would be to omit them...

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angusdavis
This is off on a tangent from the piece about Google and Rupert, but it's
worth noting that in the general discussion of the demise of the traditional
print newspaper business, few folks point out that the small community papers
are in a better spot.

The real issue is that the national and world news has become a commodity that
you can get from nearly anywhere. At the same time, the quality of the
reporting has declined. Folks like Politico may represent the future of
national reporting -- a leaner group of highly talented journalists getting
interesting stories out. But why pay to read about some major national news
story in paper XXX when you have 1,000 other news sources to read essentially
the same content?

Conversely, take a look at small community papers. For example, my hometown
paper is online at <http://bristolri.com/>. These guys are doing just fine (I
know the publisher). You can't get their content anywhere else. And you know
what? Average everyday people want to read local stories about the new school
superintendent, the police report, the controversy over a local land
development deal, the letters to the editor from their neighbors, etc. They
buy the paper. Local advertisers still advertise. The paper is doing fine, and
he's not alone -- lots of small papers are doing OK because their content has
not been commoditized.

As for Rupert Murdoch, I think he's going in the wrong direction. If I were
him, I'd worry less about distribution rights on my essentially worthless
commodity national news content, and I would instead set my target on the big
ratings agencies. The ratings agencies played a huge role in the credit crisis
-- they basically gave bonds a gold star that were, in reality, crap. They
should be vulnerable with some sort of new model. There are few companies
positioned as well to destroy Moody's as News Corp / WSJ / Dow Jones with
their depth of financial industry content / resources / etc. I don't have any
idea of exactly what a rating agency 2.0 would look like, but it would seem
like a much more productive and valuable place for Rupert to put his focus.

~~~
easp
The other problem the big newspapers chains have is that many of them have
substantial debut burdens, which is, again, something a lot of smaller locally
owned papers didn't have the privilege or inclination to do.

------
startingup
I think the real debate here is that value in the internet is moving
relentlessly away from content producers towards content aggregators. Even a
big newspaper site doesn't have the diversity that you find in an aggregator
like Google News; likewise, no tech blog can compete with the diversity of
news in Hacker News. I visit TechMeme and Hacker News far more than I visit
any single blog, for example. TechMeme makes far more money than any
professional tech blogger too.

Aggregators tend to build much more value to themselves quickly by riding on
other people's content. Yet, aggregators are worth nothing without the
underlying content. This irks many content producers, particularly the
professional ones whose output accounts of the bulk of the traffic that
aggregators end up sending. This trend of professionally produced content
accounting for the bulk of the links is evident even in Hacker News.

If these trends continue, giant aggregators could end up controlling much of
the content. Yahoo already produces a lot of content, and licenses content for
Yahoo News (which is fitting considering Yahoo News has more traffic than any
news site in the world). Google News, Digg etc. could follow.

This is the future I suspect Murdoch does not like, because it appears from
his perspective to be third parties building value out of his content, without
compensating him. Legally, I am not sure he has a claim - if there is a
lawsuit on this, it will reach the Supreme Court, that's for sure.

~~~
easyfrag
Exactly. I don't think Murdoch is actually upset that Google drives people to
his sites, what bugs him is that they go to Google first.

When you read a story in a newspaper, you almost automatically consume other
content in that paper, including ads. Why pick up another paper to read more
news when it's already in your hands? To a lesser extent the same is true for
cable news, you watch a brief segment and you are bombarded with "coming up
next" teasers and flashy graphics, pretty anchors, etc., all designed to keep
you on that channel (watching ads).

The web is way less sticky than even television, sure you could flip channels
but you lose context, and you might have to keep flipping to find something
interesting, broadcast is a push medium. Contrast this with the web page: what
is the easiest thing to do after reading the linked story? Search around the
new site (that you may not be familiar with) or hit the back button and resume
what you were doing: Pulling down stories you want to read, instead of waiting
to see if something interesting comes up.

I think Murdoch gets the power of the aggregator, I don't think he understands
that he has always pushed content to consumers. (Yes a lot of work goes into
creating a brand that attracts these consumers to the paper/network but once
they are there they have content pushed to them.) The web is a pull medium.

Billions were spent on the "portal wars" of the 90's, and everyone who
participated lost to a page with a text box and 2 buttons.

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chrischen
I want google to comply and stop linking to AP and Murdoch. See if their
revenues increase after less people can find their content.

~~~
easp
Yeah, I think such a move would hurt Murdoch and AP more than it would hurt
Google. I understand contextual advertising, I suspect that Google makes far
less than average on searches for news related terms, because people aren't
looking to buy something, or solve a problem.

And while they are at it, they should cut off access to customers on ISPs that
are pursuing an anti-net-neutrality agenda.

In both cases, I think Google would be better fit out for a war of attrition
than their adversaries. On the other hand, Google probably doesn't want to
hand Microsoft any opportunities right now by cutting off ISPs.

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rythie
I've seen this story repeated a number of times now. Murdoch seems to be
obviously wrong to those of us that follow this stuff. I wonder however, if
Murdoch is trying to convince the 99% of the public who don't read
HN/Techcrunch et all that Google is doing something bad here when he doesn't
believe it himself.

If not he is simply out of touch.

------
wmf
It seems obvious to me that Murdoch et al. want to stay in the Web and be paid
rather than de-index and disappear. Given that, these "just use robots.txt"
articles seem just as disingenuous as the original statements they're mocking.

~~~
greyman
You was downmoded, but I think you are right. From the article:

"go to Google News, or type a newsy topic like "Obama wins Nobel" into
Google's search box. What do you get? Headlines and very brief teasers linking
to news stories from news sites. If you click on them, you are taken to that
news site, where you can read the story, which is surrounded by that site's
ads. What, exactly, did Google steal in this scenario?"

What exactly did Google steal? Very exactly, Google steal "Headlines and very
brief teasers". From the perspective of copyright law, yes, it can be
classified as quoting, so they can't sue google, but those "headlines and
teasers" do carry news value and in some cases took large amount of resources
to produce. Now, Google took it and provided link as a payoff. Is that payoff
adequate? Murdoch and many news producers don't think so.

Of course, teoretically you can use robots.txt. But in reality you can't,
since your competition is also indexed, so you have to play by Google rules,
even if you believe they didn't pay you enough for the value they are taking.

~~~
anApple
I think that you can do this under "fair use", but "fair use" doesn't exist in
all countries in the world.

And google has to obey to local laws and local copyrights and not just to US
law.

The google book case is just another thing that's going to backfire at google.
The ignorant attitude of google making foreign books (books written by authors
where it is clearly illegal by the law do scan in the books and make those
freely searchable on the net) available to all US citizens, even though the
authors don't want their books to be available trough google, will only create
more hate against google.

~~~
artsrc
Anyone who wants to can opt out.

I personally know an author who is simply delighted that google is making his
(out of print) book available. I think he will even get payment if someone
wants the whole book.

~~~
anApple
It should be opt in, not opt out!

You can't also steal something in a store, just because the store didn't tell
you not to steal something!

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robryan
As many people have said before, you can get reprinted news from everywhere,
people will never pay for that kind of news as there will never be a situation
where someone doesn't find value distributing in with the advertising model.

Investigative journalism and niche long form articles are the way to go, you
create an interesting enough website for long form in a niche and people
interested in that area will pay (well at least I could justify it).

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gsmaverick
I can't believe Google ever paid the AP in the first place. Seems like a bad
deal from Google's perspective. They could have easily done without the AP's
content.

~~~
uinuibui
AP doesn't compete with Google, they don't run ads. The newspapers do - if the
newspapers were to all disappear but AP survived that might be good for an
online source of news and ads?

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nfnaaron
Because he doesn't want his ad salespeople to have to admit to potential
advertisers that "well, yes, in fact, we are not findable on google and other
search engines."

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DomesticMouse
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
win.

