The leaders of two of the world’s major news organizations said yesterday it was time for search engines and others who use news content for free to pay up.
The comments from The Associated Press’ Tom Curley and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp come as the media industry struggles in the Internet age. Many news companies contend that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune off their articles, photos and video without fairly compensating the news organizations producing the material.
“We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission,” Curley, AP’s chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing.
“Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers,” Curley said. “We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.”
He said content aggregators, such as search engines and bloggers, were also directing audiences and revenue away from content creators.
“We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it,” Curley said.
Murdoch also told the opening session of the World Media Summit in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People that content providers would be demanding that they be paid.
“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph,” the News Corp chief executive said.
AP licenses its stories and photographs to many of the Internet’s main hubs, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN, and its work is also used by hundreds of Web sites owned by newspapers and broadcasters. Currently, they all get the material at the same time.
Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) said at the same event that Beijing would protect the rights of international news organizations reporting in China.
Hu also said in an opening speech that news organizations had an obligation to help keep peace in the world.
“We will continue to make government affairs public, enhance information distribution, safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of foreign news organizations and reporters, and facilitate foreign media coverage of China in accordance with China’s laws and regulations,” Hu said.
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