Gods forbid he do anything that actually, y'know, works and doesn't cost the other party money.

Actually, I think the biggest problem is the "doesn't cost the other party money" bit - it would actually cost him a little bit of money (probably about 25 - 50c Australian all up, I think) to get the chief web monkey for News Corporation to add one line of text to the templates for all the various "news" organs the corporation controls, whereas if he demands Google and other content aggregators pay him a royalty for daring to link to his stuff, he might just make some money from the stupidest of them, and maybe set a precedent which could change the way the whole world-wide-web works so that it stops being an information sharing resource for everyone who has access to it, and starts becoming an information selling resource - primarily for him. So it's the standard problem most corporate bosses have with the internet, I figure - they can't see an easy way to milk it for every penny they can get, so they want to change the rules of the game to make it easier for them.