Murdoch shows he doesn’t understand how content works

News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch caused a stir over the weekend with some comments he made on Twitter after the Obama administration criticized the SOPA anti-piracy bill.

Murdoch criticized President Obama for siding with “Silicon Valley paymasters” who threaten software (and presumably content) creators with “plain thievery.” Then he attacked Google for being what he called the “piracy leader online,” and for streaming movies for free while selling advertisements around them — something that appeared to be a reference to copyright violations on YouTube. Finally, the News Corp. chairman said he had searched Google for links to the movie Mission Impossible and found several sites offering free links. It’s more than a little ironic that Murdoch made these comments just a day or so after admitting that his company screwed up royally with Myspace, the social-networking leader it paid more than half a billion dollars for in 2005 — only to be forced to sell it last year for just $35 million after mismanaging it into oblivion. In a message that seemed to be a response to his many critics on Twitter, he admitted that the simple answer to the entity’s massive failure was that News Corp. had “screwed up in every way possible,” but the company had “learned lots of valuable [and] expensive lessons.”