AP, News Corp Bosses Tell Search Engines to Pay Up

The leaders of two of the world's major news organizations said Friday that it is time for search engines and others who use news content for free to pay up.

Chinese President Hu Jintao, left, shakes hands with The Associated Press President Tom Curley,...

Chinese President Hu Jintao, left, shakes hands with The Associated Press President Tom Curley, center, at the opening ceremony of the World Media Summit at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Friday, Oct. 9, 2009. The leaders of two of the world's major news organizations said Friday that it is time for search engines and others who use news content for free to pay up. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

(AP)

The comments from Tom Curley of The Associated Press and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch come as the media industry struggles in the Internet age. Many news companies contend that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune from 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, the 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 to 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.

Curley said in a speech earlier this week in Hong Kong that the AP was considering selling news stories to some online customers exclusively for a certain period, perhaps half an hour.