Murdoch lashes out at Obama and his "paymasters" over SOPA
Published: 17 January, 2012, 00:08
Chairman and CEO of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch, California, January 15, 2012 (Reuters / Danny Moloshok)
TAGS: Obama, Politics, Law, Internet, USA, Media
What have we learned so far from Rupert Murdoch’s foray into Twitter? Exactly what most could have predicted: giving a cranky, octogenarian billionaire an outlet that can’t be censored is quite entertaining.
If Murdoch has his way, however, a black curtain could soon be coming to the Web and keep even the wealthiest of media moguls from having their say.
Despite being apparently smitten with the microbogging site as of late, Murdoch apparently doesn’t want to keep the Internet open for everyone. In a recent rant posted via a series of tweets, the News Corp. CEO came after US President Barack Obama for his position against both the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. Under the proposed legislations of SOPA and PIPA, the World Wide Web will be greatly altered to filter Americans from accessing content found questionable by Congress. As a massive campaign to nix the law before it makes it to legislation swells, the White House announced over the weekend that the commander-in-chief will not be supporting the Acts.
Murdoch, who has pumped massive amounts into advancing the bills, doesn’t quite agree with Obama.
"So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery," Murdoch tweeted over the weekend. "Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying."
Google, however, doesn’t quite see things the same way. Responding to the rant to the website CNET, a spokeswoman for Google calls Murdoch’s mad diatribe “nonsense” and adds, "Last year we took down 5 million infringing Web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads…We fight pirates and counterfeiters every day."
In his best crotchety, staunchly old man Twitter voice, Murdoch says Google has got it all wrong. After calling out the search giants for apparently coming close to destroying the entertainment industry, Murdoch shut up his naysayers by conducting a web query for a complimentary digital copy of the latest Mission: Impossible movie.
“Wow, several sites offering free links. I rest my case,” tweeted Murdoch.
RT decided to follow up and actually conducted our own Google search for free products. Could we find a copy of Mission: Impossible? Eventually. But we also found lots of free, no-questions-asked erectile dysfunction pills and complimentary iPads. Apparently our Web department was also the one-millionth visitor to a site we didn’t even try to get to so we expect the check is in the mail for that one too.
Since he is 80 years old, perhaps we can check say that Mr. Murdoch is far more venerable at Web surfing than all of us here, however, so maybe he does know what he’s talking about. He goes on to say note that, “Incidentally, Google blocks many other undesirable things.”
We were skeptic of that one too. A search of “how to make a bomb” turned up 1,080,000 results in 0.31 seconds.
A search for “really good show on Fox” yielded four.
The websites WikiPedia and Reddit are both preparing for a massive black-out campaign to raise awareness of the dangers of SOPA and PIPA this week. Other online campaigns have spurred massive protests across America so far.
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This seemingly immortal monster has been hacking the phones of the families of those whose children have been murdered to get a good story for his newspapers, and here he is crying out for the elite at the top; who are literally drowning in their billions, trying to protect them from losing as much as a dime for the short time it takes to write a song or turn up to do a movie take. And why? Because he’s trying to protect his own multibillion dollar media marketing empire. All this at the expense of the little man on the street.
Are we going to allow this disgusting man and his elite buddies to ruin the internet as we know it; simply to further inflate their already over flowing bank accounts? I don’t think we are. This man is the epitome of scum, and a true representative of the evil that our planet can well do without.







, During my sirceve in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. Taken in context, the sentence, despite some initial ambiguity, means that as a congressman Gore promoted the system we enjoy today, not that he could patent the science, though that's how the quotation has been manipulated. Hence the disingenuous substitution of inventing for the actual language. But the real question is what, if anything, did Gore actually do to create the modern Internet? According to Vincent Cerf, a senior vice president with MCI Worldcom who's been called the Father of the Internet, The Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the Vice President in his current role and in his earlier role as Senator. The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act. The University of Pennsylvania's Dave Ferber says that without Gore the Internet would not be where it is today. Joseph E. Traub, a computer science professor at Columbia University, claims that Gore was perhaps the first political leader to grasp the importance of networking the country. Could we perhaps see an end to cheap shots from politicians and pundits about inventing the Internet?