VIDEO: Rupert Murdoch: Paywalls, politics, and more

[KiwiCoromandel]

Upon watching this interview i have come to this conclusion...

Rupert Murdoch is an idiot....an extremely rich idiot...but an idiot none the less...

That may sound just a bit presumptuous of me to call the incredibly wealthy Rupert Murdoch an idiot especially when I am currently a pauper. Nonetheless the man makes a fool of himself everytime he opens his gob and talks about HIS model for making money on the internet with news. He shows he just doesn’t get it....

Here is an interview he did explaining, well….not explaining very well, just how he plans to hide his sites from the omnipotent Google.

Sky News political editor David Speers talks to News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch about paywalls, politics, and more.

image: Fair Use/Youtube/Screengrab: RUPERT MURDOCH

[DudeAsInCool]

I was going to post this, but you beat me to the punch B) Basically Murdoch says they haven't figured out the proper revenue model for the web yet - so he lashes out at Google.

There are solutions to resolving how to charge for media online - but the answer is not the same business model they use for traditional media distribution. People consume more media than ever - the trick is to make it high quality, convenient to use and cheap.

Suggesting that "Fair use" can be legally challenged is not the path he should take

[KiwiCoromandel]

Rupert Murdoch Plans To Hide His Sites From Google, The World Yawns.....

Stan Schroeder at Mashable! attempts to understand the mad ramblings of the old man of the media....

read more: http://fwd4.me/3aA

source: Mashable/Stan Schroder

image: Fair Use/youtube/Screengrab: RUDOLPH MURDOCH: “We’d rather have fewer people coming to our websites, but paying.”

[KiwiCoromandel]

Suggesting that "Fair Use" can be legally challenged is not the path he should take

i agree mate....he`ll have a job on his hands....google has practically "embedded" the concept of Fair Use on the internet, at least for the purposes of description and/or review....it`s precisely the argument used by Google in their current copyright negotiations with the various associations representing authors around the world...

[KiwiCoromandel]

The economic value of "Fair Use"....

Copyright law involves a delicate balance, and in the U.S. fair use is an important part of that equation. This study suggests that it's also an important part of the U.S. economy.

read more: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/200...f-fair-use.html

image: Fair Use/Google Public Policy blog/Screengrab: FAIR USE....By enabling journalists, scholars and the general public to quote from and comment on others' writings, the fair use doctrine underscores basic rights of free expression.

[DudeAsInCool]

Cory Doctorow - Boing Boing translates for us:

Update: So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he's hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

He may, in fact, get a taker. And it will be a disaster. A search engine whose sole competitive advantage is "We have Rupert Murdoch's pages!" will not attract any substantial traffic. The search engine will either go bust or fail to renew the deal.

On this fair use question, my guess is that some evil Richelieu in the legal department has been passing torrid whispers to Rupert about how the Berne Convention's "Three Step Test" for exceptions to copyright is overstepped by US fair use and by many countries' fair dealing rules. So Rupert thinks that he can take a case to the WTO (membership in the WTO is contingent on compliance with the Berne Convention) and get all these rules struck down.

Of course, Rupert's own media products make frequent and copious fair use of other copyrights -- you can't create without fair use. But the mustache-twirling lawyer at Newscorp probably didn't mention this to Rupert Palpatine (the lawyer probably thinks it'd be OK if every single one of those fair uses was replaced by a process in which lots of lawyers negotiated the terms of every use, probably all reporting to him).

They're wrong, of course. The WTO's rules -- and Berne -- are necessarily subservient to realpolitik, viz., the US gets $1 trillion of economic activity out of fair use, and it's not going to get rid of it because it makes some UN agency sad (if the UN mattered to the US, the US'd be paying the billions in back-fees it owes). And if the WTO imposes trade sanctions on the US, they'll just be ignored, because the world's factory-states (China, with also-rans such as India and Vietnam) can't afford to stop sending shipping containers full of Happy Meal toys to America. And if the WTO tries to embargo China, it'll quickly discover that the rest of the world isn't prepared to live without plastic tchotchkes and junkware either.

So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet, hoping that the world's politics and economies will reform themselves to suit your fevered imaginings. This is how history will remember you.