Rupert Murdoch’s Times Online has blocked public relations news monitor Meltwater from indexing its content.
This move extends Murdoch’s much-discussed policy to block search engines and build paywalls around his sites. Times Online is scheduled to move behind a paywall later this spring, reports PaidContent.
Earlier this year, Times Online blocked news aggregation service NewsNow. This move was followed by The Sun and The News of the World, from elsewhere in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Similar action was taken by other key players in the UK press, in a move to force aggregators to pay for the content found by crawling their sites.
Early in 2010 UK news publishers, in the guise of the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), beefed up the terms by which traditional news-clipping services pay for accessing their content to include online aggregation services.
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NewsNow and others reacted by objecting as a matter of principle but did in fact comply with new rulings by removing stories sourced from NLA members from their paid-for services. Only Meltwater has remained non-compliant and, as a result, has now been blocked from accessing content from Times Online.
Further detail at PaidContent.
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