Struggling to adapt to the Internet, entertainment and media companies have gone back and forth over the issue of whether to charge for the material they make available online. News organizations have been particularly conflicted -- first they tried to collect fees on almost all their stories online, then they tried charging just for archived stories, then they made much or all of their work available for free in the hope of attracting advertisers to their websites. Now, some are talking about going back to the future, erecting "pay walls" that would force Web users to pay for much or all of the stories published online. News Corp. chieftain Rupert Murdoch has even pledged to make his newspapers’ stories invisible to Google’s search engine, making them harder to find in addition to raising their price.
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