Rupert Murdoch has penned a refreshingly sensible post on his blog, The Wall Street Journal op-ed page.

Mr. Murdoch makes four generally agreeable points:

• Newspaper publishers should stop whining about technology and figure out how to use it.

• Quality content is not free.

• The old ad-supported newspaper model is "dead", so paid content is the future.

• Government funding of newspapers is a supremely bad idea.

There's more of course, and publishers without the breadth of News Corp's resources may find Mr. Murdoch's prescriptions for success elusive or unattractive.

True, Mr. Murdoch's Wall Street Journal successfully charges for its online content, but it's the exception that proves the rule. And when Mr. Murdoch writes, "media companies need to give people the news they want," I can hear some publishers harrumphing he's got it backwards: real journalists want to give people the news they need.

I wholly endorse Mr. Murdoch's sentiments regarding government funding of newspapers (Is there anyone who remembers Pravda as a model of independent journalistic achievement?) I'm even sympathetic to his predictable plea for less media regulation, although he's so wrapped in the flag of his adopted thirteen colonies as he calls for relaxation of the FCC's cross-ownership rules his detractors will undoubtedly recall Samuel Johnson's observation about patriotism and scoundrels.

Mr. Murdoch's candid acknowledgement that the old business model for newspapers is broken is a welcome change from the chorus of "blame Google" laments that have turned "Future of Media" confabs into the conference circuit equivalent of Japanese Noh theater.

But Mr. Murdoch is not prepared to let bloggers and online news aggregators off easily. He writes:

"[T]here are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production. Some rewrite, at times without attribution, the news stories of expensive and distinguished journalists who invested days, weeks or even months in their stories—all under the tattered veil of 'fair use.'"

"These people are not investing in journalism. They are feeding off the hard-earned efforts and investments of others. And their almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not 'fair use.' To be impolite, it's theft."

"Right now content creators bear all the costs, while aggregators enjoy many of the benefits. In the long term, this is untenable. We are open to different pay models. But the principle is clear: To paraphrase a famous economist, there's no such thing as a free news story, and we are going to ensure that we get a fair but modest price for the value we provide."

In a nutshell, Mr. Murdoch asserts the same argument made by Supreme Court Justice Mahlon Pitney in the 1918 case International News Service v. Associated Press. In that case, a 6-2 majority upheld a lower court injunction prohibiting International News Service from "bodily appropriation" of freshly published Associated Press news stories, which were often telegraphed westward and published simultaneously in competition with AP-affiliated newspapers on the U.S. west coast. In the case, Associated Press prevailed on a theory of unfair competition (copyright was not an issue because it was generally unavailable to news stories at that time) in a case that established "misappropriation" as a form of unfair competition.

Over time, the force of International News Service v. Associated Press with regard to the original issue has faded, in part because subsequent jurists and legal scholars concluded that the formidable dissenters in the case, Justice Holmes and Justice Brandeis, had the better arguments, but also because of changes to copyright law in the intervening decades.

Lately, however, David and Daniel Marburger have circulated a paper advocating an amendment to copyright law that would effectively reinstate publishers' rights to enjoin aggregators from republishing without consent. What's more, current Associated Press CEO, Tom Curley, has been floating the notion of a licensing "head start" for cooperating publishers and aggregators, a central theme in the 1918 case. This idea seems to be gaining traction among publishers, and the threat may be partly responsible for some of Google's recent conciliatory gestures toward the publishers.

But in a wonderful irony, while Mr. Murdoch's argument reads like the majority opinion he favors, his words echo Justice Brandeis's right up to the conclusion:

"Plaintiff further contended that defendant's practice constitutes unfair competition because there is 'appropriation without cost to itself of values created by' the plaintiff, and it is upon this ground that the decision of this Court appears to be based. To appropriate and use for profit, knowledge, and ideas produced by other men without making compensation or even acknowledgment may be inconsistent with a finer sense of propriety, but, with the exceptions indicated above, the law has heretofore sanctioned the practice." (emphasis added).

For a fascinating, detailed and eminently readable overview of the case, I recommend University of Chicago Law School's Douglas G. Baird's "Property, Natural Monopoly and the Uneasy Legacy of INS v AP".