Well, Rupert Murdoch has threatened to take all News Corp's content behind a paywall and yank it out of Google, according to a SkyNews interview. If I understand him right, he also thinks that the doctrine of fair use is suspect. No, seriously. Hop on over to YouTube and have a look. At BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has a predicatably entertaining take.

Rupert joins local media mogul Albert K. Sherman in this grand, inspired paywall Papierdämmerung. You can see the June, 2009 interview with Sherman about the Newport Daily News decision to disappear its content from the Web on Nieman Journalism Lab.

What makes me really annoyed is the disregard for the community in all of this. If you can't meet the community's needs for information with your current business model, either fix the model or admit who you really serve.

One of my Communications professors used to remind us like a mantra: What does television sell? "Eyeballs to advertisers," we would repeat in unison.

The Web ain't TV. The implications of this fact will become apparent.

Update: A nice day-two on the story from Australia, "Dear Rupert, this is how the internet works. Google it," where the writer goes looking for Murdoch's story and finds it in papers which *cough* Murdoch doesn't own...

"There are many reasons the Telegraph and Guardian stories may have ranked higher in Google’s search results, but the key one is how many people linked to those stories. Google treats a link as a recommendation. A vote for relevance.

People don’t link to stories behind a paywall, so they’re inevitably ranked lower.

If you ask Google not to index your stories, they won’t be discovered at all."
— via Crikey.com

As Cory Doctorow is fond of saying (and attributing to Tim O'Riley): The enemy of the author is not piracy, it's obscurity.

Hat tip to @jeffjarvis for the find.

Update 2: Cory Doctorow expands his BoingBoing take in a delighful screed in the Guardian, "For whom the net tolls."