zett - 7:58 pm on Nov 11, 2009 (gmt 0)

Ah, what an interesting thread!

First, I think that Murdoch knows A LOT about all this. He wouldn't go on the record if he wouldn't see a chance to reach his goals.

What are his goals, then?

1) Make the public (and more importantly: other news companies) aware of the issues with Google News and other content scrapers. He focuses on Google as the Google brand is well known to the general public.

2) Convince the biggest news companies to erect paywalls and block Google. This is the hard part. Everyone follows the same thinking ("Let the others block Google, I won't because I will be happy about the few percent additional traffic."). What everyone is missing (probably) is that the entire online news business is NOT sustainable. It only generates a fraction of the print business, so ultimately it does not really matter whether you get a few percent additional traffic from Google - Murdoch's goal is much more generic: To change the way the news industry looks at the Internet, and to save it from the doom that is lurking around the corner.

3) He wants to re-instate the "old" (i.e. pre-Internet) interpretation of the copyright laws, i.e. the way it works in the physical world. And there it is clearly "opt-in". Only Google has turned the whole thing around and made the web copyright "opt-out". If you don't want to be scraped, please change your robots.txt file. That's not how Rupert understands the world.

All three goals are very valid, and I think that Murdoch is one of the few players who could actually take up the fight with Google. His pockets are deep enough to do whatever he wants. And though I do not like him or his publications very much, I still wish him luck with this enterprise.

I think that Google's way of interpreting the copyright is wrong and in fact bad for anyone who works in the content/news business.