Rupert Murdoch Decries Web “Parasites” Yet Exploits Aggregation

by Robert Quigley | 2:07 pm, November 12th, 2009

» 5 comments

Rupert Murdoch dropped the hint that he was thinking about pulling The Wall Street Journal’s content from Google earlier this week, decrying Google News and aggregator sites as thieves, “plagiarists,” and “parasites.” Conveniently overlooked: plenty of News Corporation sites pull content from other sites, some extensively.

TechDirt makes the excellent point that foxnews.com, All Things D, Rotten Tomatoes, and, yes, The Wall Street Journal‘s site all aggregate to greater or lesser extents, with Rotten Tomatoes, which is owned by News Corp. subsidiary IGN, being the closest to pure aggregation. Here’s their writeup of the WSJ site’s ‘transgressions’:

Well, let’s start with the flagship Wall Street Journal itself. It integrates its own “aggregator” with headlines and links to other stories. For example, on the WSJ’s tech news page if you scroll down, you’ll find a bunch of headlines and links to other sources — without permission.

Oops. Looks like the WSJ is “parasiting” and “stealing” according to Murdoch. Perhaps he should cut them off too.

When Murdoch dropped the The Blogs predictably fell into a tizzy; the reactions split between “he’s so dumb, u can’t do that” and “he’s probably just bluffing to negotiate for licensing fees from search engines.” When a businessman is as shrewd and successful as Murdoch, it’s wisest to give him the benefit of the doubt. But it’s also fair to say that if he doesn’t know what his own sites are up to, Murdoch — who Michael Wolff claims had never used Google as of a year ago — probably does not understand the Web’s content economy very well.

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http://www.facebook.com/people/Joe-Callan/100000200979966 Joe Callan

Oh Rupe, that crazy ol’ bugger…he doesn’t realize how very easy the solution is. If he doesn’t like the internet, he simply needs to take down every website representing each of News Corp’s holdings.

Problem Solved!
m

I can’t blame someone that old for not understanding what the internet is and how it works.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Gary-Williams/1251852992 Gary Williams

With any luck, Murdoch’s conservatism will compel him to remain stuck in the status quo and behind these rapidly other media corps who can evolve with the times. And considering how fast the times are changing today, it’s really no wonder that people who cling to traditional ways of doing and seeing things are now beginning to go right off their rockers. The status quo they defend so passionately today often times was a position held by progressives only a few generations ago. Reminding them of that fact is like pulling the carpet out from under their world; the result of which is their frequent escapes into flat-out fantasy or lies. There’s nowhere else for them to go!
ImNotBlue

Oy vey. I can’t claim to understand what’s going on here… but the responses above are laughable. All three talk about Murdoch as though he’s the one making the decisions here… not that he has a team of people working with him, lawyers, and media professionals figuring this stuff out. It’s like read comments from Bevis and Butthead… “Heh heh heh… Murdoch is old. Heh heh heh… old.” Get a grip. There’s more than meets the eye here, and if there wasn’t, I’m fairly confident Murdoch wouldn’t be talking about it.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Joe-Callan/100000200979966 Joe Callan

ImNotBlue:

“All three talk about Murdoch as though he’s the one making the decisions here… not that he has a team of people working with him, lawyers, and media professionals figuring this stuff out”

You mean the brilliant team that told him to buy MySpace right before it started tanking? Yeah, I think I’m still comfortable with my assumption.

Oh…heh-heh, heh…I said “ass”. Heh-heh-heh. “ass.”