News Corp supremo Rupert Murdoch has pledged to continue his campaign to stop Google ‘stealing’ his content for its Google News platform in a recent interview with Marvin Kalb.
Murdoch claims that while Google is simply stealing content from newspaper websites, Apple’s new iPad could be the saviour of newspapers by allowing people to read the news without buying a printed paper. Murdoch wants to charge for the online content of his newspaper websites and believes that Google makes this impossible as it steals his content for free use.
Murdoch obviously doesn’t understand the level of traffic that his websites, and indeed every other website on the Internet, receives from Google.
Murdoch commented:
We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing… there is a law of copyright and they recognise it.
They take [news content] for nothing. They have got this very clever business model.
Murdoch intends to move the UK newspapers the Sunday Times and the Times behind a ‘paywall’ in June – meaning readers will have to pay to access them. Internet experts believe this will not work as there are so many websites online offering this information for free, and often without the political bias of a newspaper – such as the BBC website for example. Murdoch doesn’t believe this:
When they have got nowhere else to go they will start paying. If it is reasonable. No one is going to ask for a lot of money.
Would you pay to read news online, or would you simply choose a website that offered content for free?
Another question is how will Murdoch’s websites cope without the traffic that Google sends them in the first place?
