Rupert Murdoch's Hypocrisy on SOPA/PIPA

Over the last week, internet activists and bloggers have inundated Congress with pleas to defeat the proposed SOPA/PIPA bills. These two pieces of legislation were purportedly drafted in an effort to stop web-based piracy of materials deemed copyrighted, trademarked, or patented; but the versions that emerged are overreaching controls that threaten to censor, blacklist, financially strangle and shut down sites that host user-uploaded materials, such as YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, Reddit, and Wikipedia. In the face of public outcry, many bill sponsors (as well as President Obama) withdrew their support, and it is unlikely that these bills, in their current form, will pass.

The bills continue to be supported by major music companies and corporate news outlets. The corporate news media are losing the battle to deliver time-sensitive and breaking news as bloggers, who have become an army of citizen journalists and photographers, have filled the gap left by sloppy and cavalier corporate reporting. The videos of pepper-spraying incidents at Occupy Wall Street protests became international symbols of the growing power of bloggers over the slow-responding corporate news media.

So it is not surprising that corporate news media mogul Rupert Murdoch had a near meltdown at seeing the SOPA/PIPA bills unravel this week. He took to Twitter and complained bitterly about Google (which hosts the popular Blogger.com site), accusing the them of being the “piracy leader,” of “plain stealing,” and of “hypocrisy” and “influence-buying” on Capitol Hill. Taken in a vaccuum, one might be led to think that Murdoch's fit of pique is an altruisitc defense of the ownership rights of various pictures, stories, and other copyrighted material.

Except for the fact that ‘across the Pond,’ Murdoch’s media empire is crumbling under the financial weight of being caught stealing privately owned information for its own profit.

In Britain, Murdoch has just agreed to pay damages to the first 37 victims of an organized and pervasive scheme his paper employed to hack private phone and e-mail messages. The initial settlements include $200,000 to actor Jude Law, $61,000 to Welsh Rugby player Gavin Henson, and $50,000 to Member of Parliament Denis MacShane. The total bill for the first 18 victims whose settlement details were disclosed amounts to more than $1 million, and police report that there are approximately 800 additional victims. Murdoch’s News Group also agreed to pay the victim’s legal fees, which came to as much as $300,000 per victim in this first round.

Lawyers for the victims stated that senior managers at Murdoch’s paper, “The News of the World,” not only knew about the hacking and theft, but also destroyed evidence and lied about it as part of a cover-up. Murdoch’s media empire has admitted that the hacking and theft of communications was pervasive, with hundreds of potential victims still left to deal with.

So it is a bit hard to believe that Murdoch has any real interest in the integrity of privately owned property. Rather, Murdoch’s only interest in SOPA/PIPA can only be attributed to an arrogant, unethical, and hypocritical effort to stifle competition and expand his own empire at all costs.


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