A man in search of a cartel

Over at the Business Insider, Jay Yarow has posted an AP story detailing the grumbling noises emanating from Rupert Mudoch, head of News Corp., and Tom Curley, head of the Associated Press, about the “free” usage of their organizations’ content by search engines like Google News.

Yarow points out how exceedingly easy it is for the content generators to block Google by inserting a little bit of code on their pages; however, it seems they’d rather fulminate about freeloading “aggregators and plagiarists.”

Talk about wanting to have your cake and eat it, too!

In the AP article, Curley describes the issue at stake as “especially serious because search engines and bloggers were directing huge amounts of revenue away from content creators,” but is that claim true? The ultimate answer is probably very difficult to quantify, and if nothing else, the organizations’ refusal to take even baby-steps toward protecting their own content via coding is quite telling. News organizations want a large number of eyeballs, but they want them on their own terms and at a price they set. They want the magnifier effect of social networking, but they want it on the terms they used to set with the old distribution channels of yesterday. When viewed from this perspective, who is the freeloader?

When you hear the Rupert Murdochs of the world talk about “taking back control of our content,” it rings a little empty, for he and his organization have always had the ability to “control” their content. If you don't want to participate in the social aspect of new media, then don't, but for God's sake, stop complaining about having to share the ball with the other kids on the playground.