News Corp. Execs Shocked at WSJ's Leaky Backdoor
Although it's hard to believe, it appears that top News Corp. (NWS) execs have only recently begun to realize that the paywall they maintain around much of the Wall Street Journal's content leaks.
Or, maybe they knew it all along, but are only now speaking out about it as part of a coordinated attack strategy on Google (GOOG) and BBC, as initiated by Rupert Murdoch earlier this week.
Either way, Jay Yarow at the Silicon Alley Insider reports that News Corp. COO and President Chase Casey told him, ""We don't want people going though a backdoor, or other channels," in order to access the large proportion of the Journal that is meant to be available only by subscription.
What he is referring to, of course, is the ease with which anyone can access the Journal's paid content. All you do is obtain the headline of a story, enter that in a Google Search field, and -- presto! -- up comes the entire article.
This is possible if Google has permission to crawl the Journal's content, paid or not -- which is the Journal's decision, because it can easily "opt-out" of those searches via the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
But it also is possible because other parties out on the vast worldwide web gain access to a Journal piece, perhaps via subscription, and choose to post it on some other random web page.
Under the second scenario, Google will find and index that version of the Journal article, not the one the search giant obtained directly from the Journal. Remember that all of this happens automatically, sans humans. Plus, it's not likely that Google could be held accountable for any of this, under exiting "Fair Use" law.
In my telephone interview yesterday with intellectual property experts David Levitt and Evan D. Brown, who spoke with me from their offices in Chicago at Hinshaw & Culbertson LLP, I asked about Google's potential liability should Murdoch choose to sue to try and close his "leaky" backdoor.
"It will partly depend on how effective of a 'walled garden' Murdoch can create," said Levitt, "because as of now, his model is clearly not working. But it also will depend on whether he actually ever opts out of Google search and caching."
Both lawyers said they doubted Google could be held accountable under the "Fair Use" doctrine for indexing pages posted by third-parties -- the second scenario posited above.
"And, Google has a very good record of successes in 'Fair Use' cases," added Brown, pointing me to one example, "Field vs. Google," filed in 2004, where the courts held for Google.
Then again, if Murdoch's words are to believed, he appears to be changing his business model to paid-content-only, which in turn, according to Levitt and Brown, could cause a judge (should a lawsuit be filed) to re-examine the relationship between the search giant and the old media empire, considering the four factors that govern "Fair Use" rulings as explained in-depth in yesterday's post.
Stay tuned.
Earlier posts this week at BNET Media: