Breathlessly waiting for Murdoch to be sued . . . or wither on the web?

The Kwika Entertainment Blog (reprinting a piece from the Huffington Post) breathlessly announces that “if Microsoft and [Rupert Murdoch's] News Corp. go forward with a deal whereby News Corp. demands that Google stop indexing its websites, don’t be surprised if it leads to one of the most important copyright lawsuits in history.”

Don’t bet on it.

Google’s display of snippets from News Corp’s web pages for search engine purposes is almost certainly fair use. Can you imagine a Google snippet ever serving as a substitute for the original? If not, then the snippet is fair use. And copying the entire site for the sake of creating the snippet is fair use too.

The idiotic part of Murdoch’s move would be that, assuming Google allows Murdoch’s publications to “opt-out” of Google (as Google does for any site — all you have to do is insert some code into your site to exclude your site from Google’s indexing), the result will be that Murdoch’s publications will lose all that traffic Google generates. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Murdoch has always had the option to opt out of Google. The other stupid player here might be Microsoft — why pay to index something that will only be losing readership?