Rupert Murdoch calls Google a 'piracy leader' on Twitter

Here he goes again. Having just admitted that he and News Corp screwed up with MySpace "in every way possible," the media mogul has taken to Twitter to criticise Barack Obama for his stance on internet censorship. And he's singled out Google as a main player in the propagation of pirated material while he's at it, TheNextWeb reports.

Well at least it's more interesting than tweeting what he had for tea.

Referring to the White House's reply to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Murdoch tweeted: "So Obama has thrown in his lot withSilicon [sic] Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery." He followed this up with: "Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts [adverts] around them. No wonder pouring millions into lobbying."

(He did qualify his statement after, tweeting: "Google great company doing many exciting things. Only one complaint, and it's important.) 

We're assuming he's referring to YouTube (owned by Google), which has been criticised in the past for hosting copyrighted material. Or maybe the search engine itself, which he singled out as "stealing all our copyrights" a couple of years ago, by collating content from newspaper sites and selling adverts against it. Murdoch, conversely, has pioneered paywalls for some of his newspaper sites like the The Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Replying to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a statement on the White House's website reads: "While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom or expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."

Is Murdoch right to single out Google? Or is he jealous it does a better job of presenting news than his walled garden approach? Let us know your thought in the comments below, or over on Facebook.