Google/Murdoch Lawsuit

                                                        

War Dammit!!

The Notion of Fact v. The Idea of Fiction

: Two Heavyweights Battle It Out: The Murdoch “Fox” v. The Google Bomb   

 

 

By Jimmy M.

     There is a very interesting debate that is currently taking place in newsrooms around the world today. At the forefront of this debate are two powerful industries, both of which serve to disperse information. These two industries, Google and (for the sake of simplicity) newspaper publishers. This debate again is focused on an interpretation of the first amendment and what is being garuanteed. What is happening between Google and newspaper publishers is a case of copyright infringment. Google serves as a huge search engine to find up to the minute news stories, stories which they take from news coverage sites such as CNN and the NY Times. But you might say what’s the big deal? There is freedom of the press you know. That’s exactly the heart of the matter. This problem with regulating the content that is shared on the internet has come up once before with the music industry and the infamous Napster website. At precisely what point can we say speech is not “free”? That there is a sum to be paid due to sourcing your information or facing the legal ramifications of committing plagiarism? Hell, I feel if I got to source where I got my quotes from, Google should do the same.

     But how can Google get away with this? Committing such a blatant illegal activity? Google is not one “person” per se. Google is an artificial one thanks to the protection under the fourteenth amendment. What Google is doing is waiting for a news source to publish a breaking story and then taking that story and posting it into their engine. The qualms that the newspapers have is they are spending money going out breaking these stories, but they receive no credit from sites like Google or AOL for example. Now the man who is leading this “holy crusade” (you’ll see why I chose this phrase in a minute) is no stranger to pushing the envelope. In fact he owns a whole network that is dedicated to pushing the envelope with their stubborn attitudes to defend ideas that may have or may have not been proven soundly wrong. The man I am talking about is Rupert Murdoch. If you don’t know who I am talking about, think back a couple of months to the Daily Post cartoon. His name got a lot of traffic then like it is now. The inherent problem according to Murdoch is that there is no restitution made for the newspapers. Google doesn’t charge the access to the story like you would if you wanted to read a printed story. Instead, Google profiteers of of ad revenue for the amount of hits the page receives. Presently, the solution to this poblem seems to be levying some sort of subscription surcharge regarding the use of Google, like Itunes did to challenge music theft from Napster. This solution may or may not, it all depends on how the first amendment is interpreted in Court, particularly the freedom of the press phrase. This is all part of an ongoing lawsuit, the result of which I am hoping the newspapers win partly because of a “vocational bias”. It will be very interesting to see what context the court applies to the First Amendment.

     If I were to resolve this issue there would be a number of examples to fall back on. These examples are failry recent ones mind you that serve to show the vague language of the first amendment particularly involving free speech and free press. The first example I would base my decision on is from a case where the state of Tennessee created a database where everyone who earned a firearm and an accompanying permit was placed under its directory. Clearly here the first amendment is in direct conflict with the second amendment. One may argue that the second amendment supercedes that of the first, but that seems like a non-sequitir. The way that was resolved was by forewarning the public and the result was no one was put in the database. Yes, yes I know its an issue of security and a safety precaution, but at the same time its also a case where the other side of the coin was not taken into account. You can’t perform an act without weighing both the positives and the negatives of such act. But anyway, back to a resolution between the unrestricted internet and content of printed material. The resolution I would propose, even though it might seem petty is placing some sort of trademark, that is representative of all stories covered in order to save expenses. I know that the counter to this is going to be all newspapers cover the same story, that will never work. And I will readily admit that yes a lot of it is the same for all papers, but I would argue that the way in which those stories are covered are not the same. Some are more insightful than the others. I will use a fire for example. This story can be covered from two perspectives, from the point of the firefighters called into action or from the neighbors of where the fire occurred. The other perspective is the person who lives in the house but that won’t be very useful since it is clearly subjective. The firefighters know the degree of the blaze directly and can deduce how the fire started. The neighbors could not tell you how the fire started, only what they were doing once they learned there was a fire.

     I think this lawsuit that Mr. Murdoch is bringing against Google and other online sources will have a momentuous impact. It will certainly bring a lot of changes to both the newspaper industry and the amount of access one has to stories on the internet. It will also be interesting to see if the court system uses any precedents to base their decision for example the NY Times v. United States. This example serves as what material could be released to the public. Here the case is what material is “free” to the public. Is knowledge that comes from the internet free? Is knowledge itself free? For the first question we will have to wait and see how things progress for the second it is most certainly not because there is a thing called tuition to get that education.