News giants demand pay for online content

By siliconindia   |   Monday, 12 October 2009, 14:49 IST   |    2 Comments
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News giants demand pay for online content
Beijing: Soon it will be search engines that will have to pay news agencies for online content. Global media leaders at the first Beijing international media summit demanded payment from search engines and others who use articles, photos and videos online. "We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Tom Curley, the Associated Press' Chief Executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing for a conference on the challenges and opportunities the media face from the Internet, technology changes and the world economic crisis. According to him, content aggregators, such as search engines, and Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook are directing audiences and revenue away from the content creators. News Corp Chied Executive, Rupert 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," said Murdoch.