News Corp's Murdoch warns he may block Google

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A woman reads the Wall Street Journal in Washington, DC. Global media mogul Rupert Murdoch has accused Google of stealing from his News Corp. empire, and warned he may block the search engine from accessing its content.

Global media mogul Rupert Murdoch has accused Google of stealing from his News Corp. empire, and warned he may block the search engine from accessing its content.

"People who simply just pick up everything and run with it, steal our stories -- we say they steal our stories, they just take them without payment," Murdoch told Sky News in a weekend interview here.

"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."

Speaking specifically about Google, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp. said he was considering banning the search engine from listing his company's content "when we start charging".

News Corp, which owns an enormous number of newspapers around the world including The Australian, the New York Post and The Times of London, is planning to soon charge all its online readers.

The user-pays model is already in place at News Corp's Wall Street Journal, where readers can only access full content as a paying subscriber.

"It costs us a lot of money to put together good newspapers and good content," Murdoch said as he defended the planned move.

Nevertheless, Murdoch said last week that his goal of erecting pay walls around his vast newspaper empire by June could be delayed.

"It's a work in progress and there's a huge amount of work going on not just with our sites but with other people," Murdoch told reporters in the United States.

Asked what was causing the delay, he said: "Everything."

"We are working all very, very hard at this but I wouldn't promise that we're going to meet that date," he said, in reference to his initial June deadline.

In his interview with Sky News, Murdoch also flagged a legal challenge to the "fair use" doctrine, which search engines use as justification for the reproduction of news stories.

However he indicated this challenge would not happen soon, saying: "we'll take that slowly".

(c) 2009 AFP

   

• Bob_Kob - Nov 10, 2009
  • Rank: 4.8 / 5 (4)
  I love it, the sooner the old media dies the better.
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• flark - Nov 10, 2009
  • Rank: 4 / 5 (3)
  "Asked what was causing the delay, he said: "Everything.""
  
  I think the fact that most people are done paying for their news is a large factor.
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• Joeviocoe - Nov 10, 2009
  • Rank: 5 / 5 (3)
  Good! Murdoch claims that Google and other hide behind "Fair Use" while he hides behind freedom of speech (rather than of the press) to have his "news stories" highly opinionated and biased. Now he can choke on it.
  
  I hope people begin to realize how different Newscorp is from REAL journalism. News should be free for the most part and only cost the minimum it takes to put together.
  
  The problem is that News has become "just a business" without any responsibility to the truth. Just a way to make money on sensationalism.
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• RayCherry - Nov 10, 2009
  • Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
  Let him charge for it!
  
  Let us all see if the world will pay to read his opinions.
  
  Let us also hope that we do not lose the little good journalism that has managed to survive until now. Amongst all the voices on the net, (as opposed to the wire), how can we filter the 'truth', or at least 'news', from the noise?
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• Jayofalltrades - Nov 10, 2009
  • Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
  I'm sure Rupert worked very hard getting his empire built, but this is one of those cases where you either change with the times, or die off. It looks like he is taking the "die off" path. Poor business decisions rarely equal profit... but then again, look at the companies bailed out by the government.
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• loboy - Nov 10, 2009
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  All Mr. Murdoch has to do is update the robots.txt file on his web servers to:
  
  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /
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• jsa09 - Nov 10, 2009
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  I think most of the search engines would be driving customers to Rupert's web pages. The search engines themselves produce only very small excerpts of what is on a page.
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