Zell is a flipping idiot

Zell Wants End to Web's Free Ride

It's time for newspapers to stop giving away their stories to popular search engines such as Google, according to Samuel Zell, the real estate magnate whose bid for Tribune Co. was accepted this week.

"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" Zell said during the question period after his speech. "Not very."

He's ridiculous. Does Google steal their content? No it indexes it and makes it easy for me to find. I would never read newspaper X if it weren't for Google because I wouldn't know it existed and I certainly wouldn't know they'd written an interesting article about how dolphins play games with sponges.

Zell can have his newspaper which only attracts the attention of local people or he can take advantage of fabulous free publicitiy and let people in Thailand or Fiji read his articles.

Stealing? My eye. When I read the articles I'm at the newspaper website, not Google. And if it's a decent paper I'll see links for several other articles I want to read. It's very common for me to look one subject and end up reading five or six other articles in the same paper.

Why would want to give that up?