Rupert Murdoch ready to sue Google?
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
I don't understand his case at all. You don't want to be indexed? Don't be. The only thing I could think of charging Google with is being a monopoly. He doesn't claim that, just that they're thieves.
BTW, the meat, such as it is, is here: http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&...
More than anything else this is a sign of how worried Rupert is by the internet.
The Wall Street Journal, which the company acquired in 2007, is already behind a pay wall and has fared much better than some of its print-media brethren in the aftermath of the global advertising recession
That's because it's the Wall Street Journal. Lets see his other properties do so well. I know I'll be queuing up for online access to The Geelong Advertiser.
More here: http://www.corporate-eye.com/blog/2009/11/news-corp-wants-to...
Unfortunately, the internet has made distributing content on a daily basis to every household a much, much cheaper prospect and hence Rupert is looking at a business with much less value present.
As a result, he doesn't like the Internet much and is a) looking for a scapegoat and b) trying to employ what little leverage he has left, in the form of legal threats.
[1] It's worth noting that in most cases newspapers do not have a competitive advantage based on the quality of content they distribute, as short of things like the Wall Street Journal the quality is uniformly lackluster. [2]
[2] Interestingly one of the strategies that newspapers have used to boost profitability have been to decrease the quality of their original content (investigative reporting and the like) and use cheap, easily sourced content (ie wire service stories, reprints of PR distributions and gossip). This has worked but has had the effect of eroding any competitive advantage the paper has held over other providers of content, like blogs. Essentially they've made rational short term decisions which have royally screwed them in the long term.
Simply updating robots.txt won't effect Google at all and will blow what little leverage he has left.
I'm not a big fan of Murdoch, but it's an interesting discussion that should go beyond the obvious technical arguments.
If Google started copying a full news site verbatim and offer its content when people search for news, that would definitely be wrong, robots.txt or not.
Strict copyright includes fair use exceptions and so on. Where fair use stops and infringment starts is an interesting discussion for me.
The GP was hyberbole that doesn't add anything to the debate. Ironically that's exactly what happens all the time on Slashdot.
If you're making the argument that the company that is automatically spidering your content should stop then your case is somewhat undermined by failing to take the simple steps to prevent aforementioned spidering.
Are you saying that if your content doesn't have a
robots.txt, then everyone is allowed to copy the content
of the site with no restrictions whatsoever