Why Rupert Murdoch is an old mummified player and European economies are embalmed

One of my favourite movie ever is A Few Good Men by Rob Reiner, with Tom Cruise playing a Navy Lawyer investigating a crime at Gitmo. In the third act there's a trial scene where a giant Tom Cruise is questioning the Gitmo base commander played by a giant Jack Nicholson. Talking to Nicholson about an order he gave to Lieutenant Kendrick (one of his senior officers) Tom Cruise asks a memorable question to the base commander: "Any chance Kendrick left your office and said, "The 'old man's wrong"?

I think indeed this last question should be exactly the kind of question that somebody on the board of news corp must have raised right after one of the last meeting with Mr. Murdoch regarding the google issue.

Indeed only a very old man can raise such arguments against google and its "news exploitation" of other media. I am a little be surprised of being here writing this, facing a matter that should be given for granted but human beings sometimes (especially old ones) are very resistant to changes coming with progress.

Actually Mr. Murdoch isn't alone, today Mr. Fedele Confalonieri, CEO of Mediaset (the italian media group owned by Silvio Berlusconi), raised the same argument against youtube and its content exploitation of copyrighted material.

Let's put some facts over here: Mr Murdoch was born in 1931, he's 79. Mr Confalonieri was born in 1937 he's 72. These people are old.
There's no other explanation for their blindness on this fake problem of copyright issue. And blindness is another key-term here. If we face the problem under a psychological point of view we can recall Jacques Lacan projection mechanism. Today's gothamist's headline reports “Media mogul Rupert Murdoch blamed NY's trouble because of Gov. David Paterson's blindness”
Comments anyone?

Old people do not understand Internet is networking the world's population to freely exchange information. All changes the Internet brought to the people's life are simply irreversible like all technological conquests were in past human history.

Internet is an extroardinary tool that gave humanity the chance of improving human communication. And it obviously has to be for free.

It's like if somebody would come up with the idea of asking a fee for breathing air or walking down the street. Crazy.
Mr. Murdoch’s threat of abandoning google news it's actually a threat against himself. Because your visibility on the Internet it's based on google's engine. Even if you are the Wall Street Journal or the BBC. There’s no difference. And that’s the magic of google news, it allows users to selects news indipendently from their source. This sounds like democracy to my ears….

This entire argument that has been raised against google and other copyright use can be judged with all due respect as "stupid" because if you threat abandoning google it's like if you threat yourself and your visibility in the world.

As google is today's world,  period.

In the end it's not yourself doing a favor to google, it's actually google that is doing a favor to News media by hosting their contents.Old people cannot understand the mechanism because they have not the same needs of younger people, so they miss their weltanschauung. (world's vision) and they don't want to understand.

Younger people daily needs are: exchanging information, music, videos, movies, etc. You can't stop people from communicating each other, especially if these exchanges are crucial for their life their education and their entertainment.

While thirty years ago young people had to walk to bring their friends their music their films and their gossips, today they use the internet.

Simply thinking of stopping this is just as dull as stopping the earth to turn around its own axis or the sun to rise every morning. It's stupid. So stupid is the the three strike law that the french government just passed (three strike. It sounds like a bowling rule) Why three strikes? Why not five or two? because they know it won't work with just one because they will shut down the Internet right away.

But if it won't work by one strike it won't either with two or three. That's for sure. Same stupid mistake is being made in England where Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, warned internet users today that the days of "consequence-free" illegal filesharing are over.
Lord Mandelson sets date for blocking filesharers' internet connections like the French did but "tougher"….

Listen to this: In Britain If illegal file-sharing is not reduced 70% by April 2011, the Government will begin ordering that illegal file-sharers be disconnected after receiving two (two because English are tougher than the French) warning letters. Letters? what letters? paper letters? this is hilarious. Will these letters be written using a feather pen?

All these announcements sound really stupid and dumb and just demonstrate that old people are out of today's business because they don't understand how to do business with today's technology. You know what will happen if the government turn off Internet connections? That the entire internet network will be shut off and internet providers will go bankrupt.

Apart from the fact that after the law will be passed hackers would already have made softwares that will allow file sharing anyway and will avoid disconnections, but this bill will certainly make somebody bankrupt: the European governements.

Because all governements that work to stop file sharing will have spent an enormous amount of money for something that is not going to work and that will be completely uneffective.
Trying to stop file sharing is the same thing as trying to stop google news. It's impossible.

Ok let’s see these old people arguments: if the argument is that file sharing had damaged the music industry that's a lie. the recent Harvard study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, showed that revenue in the overall music ecosystem was significantly higher today than in the past, it really was quite amazing that the press (and politicians) continued to spread the lie that the music industry was in some sort of trouble. It's not. It's only the business of selling plastic discs that's in trouble.

Andrew Dubber at Music Think Tank looked at two articles, one saying that "people who download music via peer-to-peer services spend more money on music than their non-filesharing peers" and another alleging that "the net drop in CD and download sales overall has increased concurrent with, and as a result of filesharing."

The only governement that seems not to be so worried about the P2P problem is the American governement. When it comes to technology and marketing, luckly the U.S. governement is the most clever in our solar system. Indeed there is still no specific legislation  banning the P2P illegal file sharing except in certain environments like College Campuses and Federal offices (the Secure Federal File Sharing Act) But that’s more than right because it’s a security matter and works as an extension of Internet security law and it has to be done. Also federal workers at their job places must work and certainly should not do filesharing-

In general the American law on P2P is made of Voluntary self-regulations. Not by chance America is the smart land of opportunities and in the past of American industry history there were other moments of real terror for industry copyright infringements because of technological advancement. Think foreinstance when the videorecorder was invented. The movie industry was frightened that people would have recorded movies instead of going to see them in theatre.Then they entered the home video business and it was the greatest success movie industry ever made. 

Same thing happened in 1948 after the studio system collapsed and television was invented, the movie majors were frightened to loose their entire business because they understood they could not compete with television. Then The Studios entered in the television market producing the film programming for home viewers. Eventually the Studios fully entered the television production,as a part of a diversification strategy to compensate the decline of production and distribution revenues in the film industry. The film studios became Television studios. Let light be made.

This attitude of pure competition, that is so healthy for economy, it's what John Maynard Keynes meant with the term "Animal spirits" that he used in his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,  to describe emotion or affect which influences human behavior: a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction.

Action and Inaction, that’s the real matter.

In general the “P2P problem" or the "google news problem” are really fake problems for tough business animals like American entrepreneurs. Indeed the governements that are more worried in this issue are Europeans, whose economies are quite "lame" if not “mummified” in terms of creativity and invention of new technologies related to the Internet. Indeed all the giant internet business are  Americans: Microsoft, Google, Apple, Ibm, etc. Regarding Rupert Murdoch he's an old man from Australia, another country that is not really significant in terms of technological advancement even if his business is a global worldwide corporation he personally has a lack in understanding how business should be done today. Especially with this damn Internet that is stealing all of his money.

In football terms he might be viewed as on defensive position, typical of old players scared to death of getting hurt and stay defensive, while everybody knows attack is the best defense.Typical of young players.

In the end most of these people are just trying to defend their old business and economies, that are alive but not "living", they're actually dead and turned off because they lack that "animal spirits" that instead is typical of American business. And a typical American marketing genius is that of Joseph Sugarman whose famous sentence is just a reflection of his reputation and of American entrepreneurial spirit:"Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem".

This is just the right attitude to face the technological and business challenges operated by internet today with google and the P2P. And especially at this defining moment of economic crisis.

Certainly the right attitude towards changes is not that of the old men who threat to go out of google or the ones advanced by the embalmed European government to sanction with two or three strikes. These arguments are ridicolous and just the contrary of Keynes animal spirit. American industry has faced many challenges in the past century and turned problems to opportunities with great success and most of its success was based on its animal attitude. And that's exactly the right attitude we need to face the future ahead.