Media magnate Rupert Murdoch applauds the iPad, defends paywalls, slams Google (again)
Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman and massively rich media-maestro, has once again attacked Google in defence of his plans for paywalls on his news sites.
“We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing… there is a law of copyright and they recognise it,” Murdoch told an audience of students, journalists and other media professionals at a National Press Club event at George Washington University.
He accused search engines of theft, and of having tapped into a “river of gold” by aggregating his website’s content for free. “They take [news content] for nothing. They have got this very clever business model,” he said.
Defending against critics who believe his paywall plans for the Times and Sunday Times are untenable considering the amount of content readily available for free on the web, Murdoch said “When they have got nowhere else to go they will start paying. If it is reasonable. No one is going to ask for a lot of money.”
During the interview with Marvin Kalb, Murdoch also praised Apple’s iPad as a game-changing device that could save newspaper publishing from the falling circulation it currently faces.
“I got a glimpse of the future last weekend with the Apple iPad. It is a wonderful thing,” he said. “If you have less newspapers and more of these… it may well be the saving of the newspaper industry.”
Via: The Guardian
