This is from an Associated Press story, about the Associated Press boss, Tom Curley, and News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch complaining, once again, about search engines and bloggers "stealing" their content. Interestingly, this story is hosted on Google who paid Associated Press to the use the story, and yet the Associated Press boss, Tom Curley, is angry about search engines like Google using their content without paying for it :
The leaders of two of the world's major news organizations said Friday that it is time for search engines and others who use news content for free to pay up.It'll be interesting to visit this story again in three or four years and see what's happened.The comments from Tom Curley of The Associated Press and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch come as the media industry struggles in the Internet age. Many news companies contend that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune from their articles, photos and video without fairly compensating the news organizations producing the material.
"We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing.
"Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers," Curley said. "We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content."
He said content aggregators, such as search engines and bloggers, were also directing audiences and revenue away from content creators.
"We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it," Curley said.
Murdoch also told the opening session of the World Media Summit in Beijing's Great Hall of the People that content providers would be demanding to be paid.
"The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph," the News Corp. chief executive said.
The AP and its member newspapers contend that unauthorized use of their material is costing them tens of millions of dollars in potential advertising revenue at a time when they can least afford it.
The AP's revenue is expected to be around $700 million this year, down from $748 million in 2008, in part because of reductions in the fees it charges newspapers and broadcasters, whose advertising revenue has been dwindling as more marketers shift to less expensive or better-targeted options online.
Murdoch and Curley were speaking to 300 representatives from more than 170 media outlets from 80 countries at a meeting that will look at the challenges and opportunities the media face from the Internet, changes in technology and the world economic crisis.
