Newspapers, no strangers to biting the hands that feed them, are fed up with Google:
“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” Dean Singleton said at a meeting this week of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) in San Diego, California.
Singleton’s battle cry came just a few days after News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch launched a broadside against Internet giant Google, whose Google News website is one of the most popular news aggregators on the Internet.
“Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked Murdoch, the owner of newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States, where his holdings include The Wall Street Journal and New York Post.
If it weren’t for Google News (and Google Alerts, and someday I hope, Google Retina HUD Implants), I wouldn’t find at least half the stories I read. Much of the rest of the links I use, I catch on Twitter. Then, of course, I blog those links and send even more readers to the MSM.
These two free services aren’t stealing ad revenue from the papers — they’re generating it. But leave it to the MSM to remain willfully, stupidly, and self-destructively clueless.
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