Google faces charges by Rupert Murdoch

Media tycoon Ruport Murdoch wants to limit search engines' access to newspapers.

A while now, rumours have been spreading that news papers will charge fees for reading online articles. The Wall Street Journal, for example, already asks money for its web-based services. Other news papers will soon follow. At least, that is the wish of News Corp's 79-year old big boss Rupert Murdoch. News Corp is the world's second-largest media conglomerate (behind The Walt Disney Company). The group editions papers like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Times of London, but also owns Fox.

News papers have been struggling with the problem of free content and find it dificult to survive on advertising income alone. Murdoch wants to rearrange the business model and is confident that readers of his products want to pay.

Nevertheless, a new problem arises. Next to online news papers, alot of information is to be found on Google. For free. However, Google - and other search engines like Bing - get their conent from those news papers. Murdoch wants to stop that. The Google model "produced a river of gold", but the content is "being taken mostly from newspapers" said this week at the National Press Club in Washington.

Only the headline and a couple of sentences should be allowed to be published on Google or Bing. If search engines would want to provide this kind of information, they should set up their own reporting.

Also the American Society of Media Photographers announced this week that they will charge Google for violating copyrights. The Union of Graphic Designers, the Association of Nature Photographers and some individual photographers and graphic designers have joined the case.

Sources: De Standaard, Bloomberg