Murdoch Accuses Google of 'Theft'

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch doesn't take kindly to content rustling, and he made that clear during a Washington forum on newspapers on Tuesday. He said that the "almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it's theft." The remark was Murdoch's latest zinger in his ongoing game of media chicken with aggregation sites such as Google, which gather headlines in a single place on the Web, usually without paying news organizations for their content. Murdoch could scare Google into paying, or else lose a huge chunk of his audience. The Australian magnate is searching for ways to stem the hemorrhaging, perhaps by forming a newspaper consortium—such publishers as the New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp., and Tribune Co. have already been approached—to charge for distribution online and to portable readers. News Corp. is also reportedly in talks with Microsoft, which would pay News Corp. to prevent articles from being listed in Google, providing their content instead to Microsoft search engine Bing.