unicornnews: CIPR criticise new NLA licence

The CIPR have described as “nonsensical” previously reported attempts by the Newspaper Licensing Agency to extend their licensing operations to so called “content scalping” when it is done on a commercial basis, mainly for media monitoring purposes.

As previously reported, the NLA provides licences that let those companies who need to make multiple copies of newspaper articles for internal consumption to do so without infringing the copyrights of the newspaper owners, whose permission is needed when making copies of any newspaper article in a commercial context. The role of the NLA and the revenues they bring in for the newspaper industry is, though, in decline as an increasing number of companies forward their staff links to online versions of relevant articles, rather than making physical copies of the printed newspaper.

It was in recognition of that fact that the NLA recently suggested that companies who provide other businesses with links to articles that reference them as a commercial service should be required to have the same sort of licence as companies who traditionally provided hard copies of articles.

That, of course, has a potentially big impact on the PR industry, which makes the most use of media monitoring and copying services, both in print and online. In a letter to PR Week, CIPR president Kevin Taylor said the idea that the NLA licence should be extended to the provision of web links was an “absolute nonsense” noting that under the proposed system: “If I call someone and tell them a web address – no charge. But if I send them the web address by email – that requires an NLA licence”.

The proposals could prove to be controversial, despite attempts by the Agency to limit the reach of their licence so that it won’t affect search engines and bloggers who primarily provide links to other articles, even though both search engines and bloggers may be commercially benefiting from their link aggregation through advertising sales.

But even with those limits, the agencies most likely to be affected by the proposed new licence, which includes Meltwater and Moreover, are talking about taking legal action to test whether copyright law really gives newspapers control over the distribution of links to their articles. As not actual copy of any real content takes place when links are forwarded, some legal experts doubt the NLA really have a case to force the new licence on the PR industry. Though stranger things have happened.

Posted Monday July 27 2009 by Chris Cooke

Related categories: CIPR Measurement & Evaluation Media Relations