[pp.au.general] Oh Rupert...

[Rodney Serkowski]

> http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/08/rupert-murdoch-vows.html

Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp's websites out of Google,  
abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals

For months (years?) Rupert Murdoch has been waving his jowls around  
and shouting that Google is stealing from him by not paying to index  
his material. And all along, we've been saying, "Pffft, right. If you  
don't like it, just add a robots.txt file that tells Google not to  
index you. Until you do, stop whining and put it back in your pants."
Now Rupert has promised to do exactly that. He claims that he's going  
to take all of News Corp's websites pay-only and have them removed  
from Google when he does.

You know what? He's lying. But I think it'd be entertaining if every  
reporter who interviewed him, for the rest of his life, said, "Hey,  
Rupert, when are you going to take all your company's websites out of  
Google?" It'd also be hilarious to get the CEOs of the various pieces  
of Rupert's empire to comment on whether they want all their company's  
materials invisible to search engines.

Rupert also thinks that fair use is illegal and that the right court  
case would result in it being "barred altogether." Again, another  
hilarious interview question for the rest of his career: "Hey, Rupert,  
when are you going to abolish fair use? How's that plan coming, pal?"


The revelation came early in the interview, after Murdoch claimed that  
Google and others are stealing News Corp content in response to a  
question about who he was talking about when he talked about  
plagiarists. "The people who simply pick up everything to run with,  
and steal our stories...they just take them..without payment. That's  
Google, Microsoft, Ask.com..a whole lot of people."

Murdoch claimed that readers who visit News Corp sites via search  
offer little value to advertisers, and that News Corp would rather  
have fewer people coming to their websites, but paying. Asked why News  
hasn't made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: "I think  
we will....but that's when we start charging."

Murdoch also claims that News Corp believes that the doctrine of Fair  
Use can be challenged in court and "barred altogether."

Epic Win: News Corp Likely To Remove Content From Google (Thanks,  
Dustin!)
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. 
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