With anyone else, we call this outburst chutzpah, but this being media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and Murdoch almost always showing a propensity for saying Murdochian things, we’ll view this following Jan. 12 tweetburst via Twitter as de rigeur.
Basically, Murdoch called out President Barack Obama and Google over the White House’s position on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), in which Obama beat the anti-piracy measure over the head with the political equivalent of a Louisville slugger bat and left it for dead in a roadside ditch. Murdoch responded thusly:
GigaOm’s Om Malik had a nice pointed response to Murdoch’s perceived hypocrisy:
That one has to hurt, as Murdoch himself said “we screwed up in every way possible” with MySpace. How poignant.
However, the comment about lobbying is another good zinger. Many Google critics have lamented the money Google pours into Capitol Hill lobbying — millions of dollars each year. There is the perception that Google is in bed with the White House and vice versa.
Not that Google needed Malik to stick up for it, telling CNET this past weekend:
“This is just nonsense. 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.“
True, but I can still go on YouTube and get a lot of pirated stuff that I shouldn’t be able to access. Viacom always pointed to copyrighted video content, but I can snag plenty of studio cuts from my favorite bands that are illicitly uploaded to YouTube.
I’m talking whole albums, that I can stream via my YouTube player in Google+. Not complaining, by the way. Just sayin’.