Why is Rupert spending millions undermining national security?
Rupert Murdoch’s efforts on Twitter so far have included the occasional case of humility. On Friday he stated the bleeding obvious in admitting about Myspace “we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons”.
Investors wondering about whether the 80-year-old mogul from the days of linotype had improved his understanding of the internet since he wasted $580 million on Myspace, however, might have been alarmed to see him launch a campaign against Google on the weekend. “So Obama has thrown in his lot withSilicon (sic) Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery,” he tweeted yesterday. “Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying.”
It was a bizarre and probably actionable claim, made in response to the fact that momentum behind the odious Stop Online Piracy Act had faltered in the US. The bill, which would in effect establish a US internet filter and enable the removal of websites via Domain Name System administration, appeared unstoppable before Christmas, but the White House has now indicated its opposition, and even the bill’s own backers in Congress have proposed withdrawing the DNS provisions and delaying the bill.
This plainly infuriated Murdoch, who as head of News Corporation is a senior figure in the vastly powerful US copyright industry, which has exploited links between Hollywood and Congress, particularly Democrats, to engineer bill after bill aimed at disrupting filesharing — wholly unsuccessfully — for a decade.
The claim that Google was a “piracy leader” that “streams movies for free” appear more like the addled ravings of an old technophobe than a serious statement, and Murdoch was clearly stung by the reaction. “Understand more than all allege! Google great company doing many exciting things. Only one complaint, and it’s important,” he later tweeted. “Just been to google search for mission impossible. Wow, several sites offering free links. I rest my case.”
That a man in charge of investing billions of dollars in the media industry doesn’t understand the difference between a search engine and what it links to should be deeply troubling to News Corporation investors, about as troubling as his insistence that no one ever told him or his son about the extensive crimes being perpetrated by senior figures in News International in the UK.
“Google doesn’t pirate and it doesn’t hack dead girls, @rupertmurdoch. I am so happy I pulled my book from you,” tweeted American journalist Jeff Jarvis. Google’s response, so far, has been rather level-headed.
Still, it wasn’t as bizarre as his complaint about Google “spending millions” lobbying. The copyright industry has a vast lobbying apparatus designed to achieve its legislative goals and News Corp is no exception. The opensecrets.org website has an up-to-date tally of News Corp’s expenditure on lobbying in 2011, which amounted to US$5.2 million, only $2 million shy of Google’s US$7.2 million (US$1.3 million of which related to telco regulation). The Motion Picture Association of America, of which News Corp is a member through a subsidiary, spent US$1.3 million on lobbying. The Recording Industry Association of America, of which News Corp is also a member via a subsidary, spent US$4.4 million.
Still, if only one of News Corp’s many tabloids would apply to Murdoch the sort of scrutiny that they insist on applying to other public figures. One of the critics of SOPA was a US government agency that told the Congressional Homeland Security sub-committee that the bill would undermine current efforts to improve internet security.
In short, Murdoch is backing something that has grave corporate and national security implications.
Maybe no one’s told him that, either.
Yes I would say a grudge againt My Space is lurking as you say
Ha ha this is funny.
I would say that when push comes to shove the millions of people now downloading movies for free will not be murdochs friends if he ever manages a dns against all file sharers. And whats the likelihood of technology outpacing the efforts to police it? If the poor old codger ever understood how technology advances have outdated him he would probably die of shock, perhaps its time one of his minions sat him down and explained the whole deal to him.
You cannot teach a old DOG , a new trick. He will be buried with his old paper industry soon. It’s a wonder no one has put a hit on the guy ? yet ?
free links, lol! i wonder if he followed those links how much malware his device would accumulate and whether he would even obtain the file at all…
ahem Stop Online Piracy Act. Subeditor Pleez!
sorry my bad.
“What good is the “free market” (you so passionately champion and espouse - as long as it’s run to suit you and your rules), if you can’t try to nobble your competition with hysterical hypocricy and histrionics, rather than on the floor of that market place - while trying to get those you sponsor, politically, to help you”?
There’s another story we won’t see in “The Advertiser”.
Is this the same Rupert Murdoch that broke so many laws with News Of The World? No, it must be another one.
Good ole rupe,knows his newspaper empire is on the skids,so here he trys to destroy the NBN as that pesky online stuff is a nuisance,and a threat to foxtel,really makes ackerman look like a complete fool with his attacks on anything in the telegraph to help rupe not only get regime change but destroy the NBN.
Seems rupe and abbott make a good pair as neither are tech heads,but more importantly do not understand people who are.
You’re being (deliberately?) obtuse.
Google offers a search engine, but Google makes it’s money from placing advertisements. It’s basically an advertising company.
The way advertising works is that companies would create content to attract an audience. They would then sell access to that audience to advertisers and use part of the money from selling that access to pay the content creators.
Google skips the whole “pay the content creators” part by getting people to provide content for free and then placing ads next to it. Obviously this is a much more profitable model than the older one employed by newspapers, magazines, radio and television shows. If you can get your labour costs down to zero, then clearly you will make more money.
Google also quite happily runs ads on storage sites such as Megaupload, Filesonic, Mediafire, Putlocker, and so on next to links to download pirated content, essentially exploiting the ability of that pirated content to attract an audience.
Even if don’t consider the first example as a case of profiting from piracy, the second most certainly is.
Google could quite easily establish a policy of not offering their advertising services to sites offering pirated content without in any way affecting where those sites appear on a Google search. They choose not to.
Pretending that the complaint is about Google as a search engine is just disingenuous.
Also, I find it difficult to believe that internet security depends on allowing free access to sites offering pirated content. If anything, internet security would require the ability to block access to sites offering undesirable content, such as those distributing viruses, trojans and other malware, as well as those offering things like child pornography. Sites offering pirated content would just fall into that category.
Internet security depends on trust in the name to address (number) mapping. this is provided by DNSSEC, protocol adjustments to DNS which have been over 10 years in the cooking in the IETF.
The technical community (of which I am a member) argue vociferously that passing a law which mandates changing this kind of information after publication undermines the fundamentals which lie behind trust in DNSSEC. If the US government does this, then nobody is able to reliably believe the DNSSEC signed information. It destroys the integrity in the binding of names to addresses, and of the integrity of the data being what the original publisher actually SAID about themselves in the DNS.
If you want to block access to pirate content, virally infected content, mandating that name-to-address mapping is subverted is not the way to do it.
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20120111_refusing_refused_for_sopa_pipa/ for instance, is by one of the authors of the DNS software called ‘bind’ which is the orginal implementation of DNS used almost ubiquitously worldwide.
Bring it on Rupert, and keep up the tweets. Every time you post another paternalistic clanger the millions-strong (just in Oz) file-sharing swarm sees what an anachronism your business is. The only suspense is when your advertisers work it out too.
Internet security depends on trust in the name to address (number) mapping. this is provided by DNSSEC, protocol adjustments to DNS which have been over 10 years in the cooking in the IETF.
And this has exactly what to do with national security? You know, like it says in the headline?
If you want to block access to pirate content, virally infected content, mandating that name-to-address mapping is subverted is not the way to do it.
Okay, how do we do it?
You are wrong Bernard Keane and Rupert is correct on this matter.
Google own Blogger and blogger host tens of thousands of websites that breach copyright and offer free downloads or links for just released films and even a cursory search can uncover this. And that is what Rupert said-that Google host links to these illegal downloads.
Moreover Google demand that the world play by US rules only and have to be dragged kicking and screaming to courts in other jurisdictions always proclaiming they are a US company whilst profiting world-wide.
They also allow anonymous and untraceable persons to create websites that are facilitated by blogger and the Google search engine-profiting yet again but take no responsibility. Try getting Google to delete links or websites hosted by them that contain your copyright material and you are better off banging your head against the wall.
It’s bizarre- Google is a for private private corporation that has most of the media eating out of their hands and talking of them like they are God.
It was always just a matter of time before governments worldwide try to break the Google spell so many -especially the US government -are under.
@Oscar: It looks like Rupert isn’t the only one that misunderstands search engines. Or Safe Harbor provisions.
@Bekric: How do we do it? We don’t. The answer to everything is not a technological hack that subverts the integrity of the internet. The owners of the IP could solve this by addressing their marketing model. Also, we don’t really need a plonking sermon on how advertising works.
Well, SOPA is dead, let’s target PIPA now (the US Senate equivalent)