Rupert Murdoch has publicly addressed his desire for Google to not index his content, so he can charge people to access it. As the CEO of News Corp. and, ultimately, the head honcho of Fox News, he can easily do this. As was pointed out previously, all he needed to do was ask.
Now, it’s come to light that FoxNews.com specifically asks Google’s bot to index their site. Here is their robots.txt file that gives the Googlebot instructions:
User-agent: * Disallow: /printer_friendly_story Disallow: /projects/livestream # User-agent: gsa-crawler Allow: /printer_friendly_story Allow: /google_search_index.xml Allow: /google_news_index.xml Allow: /*.xml.gz # Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_index.xml Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml
Good luck with that legal action, Rupert. All Google needs to do is hand over the robots.txt file posted above and say, “See, they wanted us to index their content.” Not to mention the Fair Use doctrine means that Google is well within their rights. Unfortunately Murdoch wants to challenge the Fair Use doctrine and, if he were to win, it could be disastrous for U.S. copyright law and all forms of media.
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