Submitted by Bob Burton on
In a King Canute-like speech to the World Media Summit in Beijing, Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of News Corporation, took aim at Google and Yahoo. "The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content," Murdoch proclaimed to an audience of 170 news executives from around the world. "But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph." The Editorial Director for Digital for The Independent, Jimmy Leach, in unpersuaded that News Corporation's aim to charge readers for content will work. "News consumers," he wrote, care "more for the subject matter than the logo at the top. There is no brand loyalty on the web – especially not if you make your content difficult to find, and you charge people to read it when they’ve done so. Murdoch is telling Google, and the whole internet that they must change. It’s unlikely either will listen."
Printer-friendly version