Rupert Murdoch wants Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) to pay for the use of content from his News Corp (NYSE:NWS) and all of his major competition. He told an audience at the World Media Summit in China that “The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content.” If he is successful in his crusade, search engines and online publications like Huffington Post are in for a rough time.
Tom Curley, the head of The Associate Press, echoed Murdoch’s sentiments while speaking at the same gathering. “Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook, have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news,” he said. It seems that all of new media is becoming a target or at least a whipping horse for the problems of old media.
What Murdoch and Curley did not make clear is whether they are willing to fight Huffington, YouTube, Google, and Facebook in the courts. Saber rattling is not going to gain Murdoch any ground. Aggregators have been accused of living off old media reporting and writing for years. Murdoch will have to be willing to settle in for a long and expensive series of legal fights over the meaning of copyright and “fair use” of content, a legal definition that has never been extensively examined by the judiciary.
If Murdoch can win he will change the media landscape radically. The sharing and dissemination of facts and news gathered by old media like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal is the only function of some sites like The Daily Beast and Google News. These sites do send traffic back to their sources, but apparently not enough to quiet criticisms by old media owners.
The copyright laws do not protect the gathering and statements of “fact.” Those are, according to the law, part of the public domain. In other word’s, Murdoch will be fighting his battle uphill against a well-entrenched foe.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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