Rupert Murdoch Doesn’t Get IT

This is already an old argument, I've been having it for nearly 15 years.

In a speech before The Cable Show, an annual cable television industry event, in Washington, D.C. Rupert Murdoch showed just how out of touch he is.

"People reading news for free on the Web, that's got to change," said Murdoch.

Reviving an already tired argument Murdoch raised his concern that search engines, blogs and portals steal revenue from newspaper sites by linking to stories published by them. The covetous Mr. Murdoch seems to resent that the referring site earns advertising dollars that he thinks belong to him.

"The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright... not steal, but take," said Murdoch. "Not just them but Yahoo."

This is the Internet era and Mr. Murdoch has it backwards. The real question is should newspaper publishers pay the referrer for sending traffic to their sites not the other way around.