In a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing, dubbed as the World Media Summit, The Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley said, “We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission. Crowd-sourcing Web services such as Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook have become preferred customer destinations for breaking news, displacing Web sites of traditional news publishers. We content creators must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content. We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it.”

AP and News Corp, two of the world’s major news organizations, now want search engines and bloggers to pay for reusing the original news content that they generate and offer online. Google is targeted as one of the culprits in making a fortune off others’ original ‘articles, photos and video without fairly compensating the news organizations producing the material.’ Another valid observation is that ‘search engines and bloggers were also directing audiences and revenue away from content creators.’

On the other hand, News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch said that ‘content providers would be demanding to be paid.’ He expounds, “The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.”

Times, they are a’ changing from hereon, with these upcoming usage changes: news stories will be sold ‘to some online customers exclusively for a certain period, perhaps half an hour;’ a news registry will be set up ‘to track content online and detect unlicensed uses in ways that could help boost revenue;’ and, as The Wall Street Journal will be imposing starting next month, charges of ‘as much as $2 per week to read its stories on BlackBerrys, iPhones and other mobile devices, expanding the newspaper’s effort to become less dependent on its print edition.’

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Via AP-Yahoo! News