US newspaper owners, their advertising revenue evaporating, their circulation declining and their readership going online to get news for free, are fighting mad. The enemy? Websites that use their stories without paying for them. ‘We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more,’ said the chairman of the Associated Press, a cooperative of over 1,400 US newspapers, borrowing a line from the anchorman character in the 1976 movie ‘Network.’ ‘We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,’ Dean Singleton said at a meeting this week of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) in San Diego, California. Singleton’s battle cry came just a few days after News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch launched a broadside against Internet giant Google, whose Google News website is one of the most popular news aggregators on the Internet. ‘Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?’ asked Murdoch, the owner of newspapers in Australia, Britain and the United States, where his holdings include The Wall Street Journal and New York Post. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ the News Corp. chairman said. Robert […]