Rupert Murdoch is a powerful man. Even so there is a limit to his power. And he may soon be discovering this for himself.

The media mogul doesn’t like certain rivals to his content empire. He rarely has anything good to say about the BBC, and as for the BEEB’s online presence, well as far as Mr Murdoch is concerned, it just goes beyond the pale.

And here is another company the naturalised American doesn’t like: Google.

What have Google and the BBC got in common? It is that word, free.

Of course the BBC isn’t really free, but it charges in a way that seems to somehow separate the use of the BBC products from the payment process.

And it’s not fair, says the man who owns the Times and the Sun. So he has this plan to start charging for content.

He is a bright spark, and knows that News Corp can’t do it alone, so he wants allies. And it is hard to think of a more powerful ally than Microsoft. Furthermore, the giant software company isn’t too fond of the word free, either.

In fact a couple of months ago, the rumour mill churned out talk that Microsoft was trying to persuade content providers to exclude themselves from appearing on Google News. The rumour suggested the software company was actually paying companies to opt out of the Google product.

We are really looking at two quite different philosophies. On the one hand you have the view that content has to be charged for, otherwise how can you expect to get quality.   The same school of thought would suggest that patents should be strictly protected too, because otherwise the R&D cost can not be recovered and therefore re-investment will cease.  

The new age idea, instead, looks at things from a different perspective.  It looks at products like Wikipedia or Linux, or, for that matter, the Google range of free software tools, and says in this modern Internet era the key to innovation is cooperation.

Linux is being developed by a vast pool of talent. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking there is no commercial gain to be had.  One active player in the Linux scene is IBM. By becoming an active player in Linux, it is able to benefit from the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars of software R&D.  The price it pays it that it loses exclusive rights over products that are developed.  But for IBM, its business model has changed. It no longer looks to make money from selling hardware, or software, rather its main revenue stream lies in its expertise.  It now has massive expertise in Linux applications, and it charges companies for this.

It is quite ironic. Because in the early days of the Microsoft/IBM saga, the small little software company was about openness and enlisting the support of as many companies as possible. IBM just focused on the one product, its PC. Today, in the era of mass cooperation, it’s Microsoft that seems to be hanging onto the old fashioned business model.

In his book, Sex Business and Profits, Terence Kealey drew a parallel with drug research. Scientists learn much of their craft from their peers, including peers who work for rival companies. They talk to each other and swap ideas. As a result, even better ideas evolve. But one researcher will not be taken seriously by the others unless he or she is respected. And respect normally comes from developing original work. So expertise is developed via interaction with peers, but this interaction only tends to take place between people of similar stature. Furthermore, goes the argument, complicated products require expertise before they can be turned into commercial products. The innovation that led to the idea of a product is only a part of the story. You need expertise to turn the innovation into an actual product.

In short, this new age idea of thinking suggests companies that want to sell cutting edge products need innovators, not because the innovators provide the products the companies sell, but because the expertise that is acquired by the innovative researchers, is essential for developing cutting edge products which build on innovations that may or may not have been developed in-house . It is a subtle, but all important difference.

Now, this isn’t an all or nothing approach. It is possible to agree, for example, with this new age idea of cooperation in the world of say software, but not in pharmaceuticals.

The content creation process sits at the no brainier end of the scale. The world is full of writers. Sometimes comments you see at the end of articles are much better than the article itself. 

The sheer size of content products is such that any company that tries to charge for content has a tough tough job on its hand. 

The only occasion when content can be charged for, is when the content is of a specialised nature. So the FT can get away it.

But the question is, can newspapers and web sites in the Murdoch empire get away with charging?

Clearly some can, but only a few.

Now Mr Murdoch is planning to charge for content appearing in The Standard-Times of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The first ten views will be free, then you are charged.

To let you into a secret, we don’t know the first thing about The Standard-Times of New Bedford, Massachusett.  But one assumes there are local entrepreneurs come writers who are cheering the News Corp move, because they will be able to leap in with their free content, get a shed load of readers, and charge a premium on advertising.

PS. In the very early days of Investment and Business News, a time when Internet conventions were not quite so clear cut as they are now, under advice, we wrote to the Times asking for permission to deep link to articles they produced.  By deep linking , we mean linking  to the specific article as opposed to a homepage.  The answer came back, a resounding no, and we were told the newspaper was pursuing all web sites that followed this practice.