Google strikes back
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, strikes back at Rupert Murdoch in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (which Rupert owns, by the way). Here’s the good stuff:
With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.
Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.
And here’s even better stuff:
It’s understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry.
Kudos to the WSJ for running the piece—assuming some editor didn’t lose his or her job for doing this. I just can’t wait to watch Google and News Corp go at it.
Photo credit: Fotolia
Comments (28)
At which point they'll find a way to blame Obama for their woes.
(But I won't be sorry to see Murcoch out of business, given his support for the political Right - but his concerns do affect the other sides too)
You're on News Corp's radar now!
Note that you also didn't hear much out of Microsoft anymore in terms of them paying off Murdoch to get exclusive rights for BING to serve up his content in their results. Why? Because the economics just aren't there.
If Google thinks that their option's are obviously so great why don't they first look at the very brink of the problem of protecting the copyrights from Journalists and Photo Journalism through software,
The truth is that they effectively don't care as long as they can get away with it, like we see so much of in todays world with institutions that have a strange take on what is fair to a market and its real causes on the real market and individual professions.
We see all to frequently Images and Articles (Syndicated) or stolen do we ever ask what was that person being paid to bring us that piece of News or why Newspapers now "suck" because of this very lack of funding, which ever way you want to look at it without any prior copyright consent of the article writer or the Image owner of the photograph under the law this is breaking all International Copyright laws, this is an Industry that really needs the coders to be shown their correct place in society and the market place.
How long can this dire consequence go on where one big company like Google can trample all over the law of Copyrights of journalists, photo journalists and infringe upon the content market without any consequences.
It naturally can't so lets look forward to a time of better News and Content that has to be paid for and the coders return to what they trained for and what they are good at.
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