Your £20m figure is also a red herring in this case. You’ve asked us for a £7,500 annual fee for a licence and an audit, which is roughly a third of our total ex-VAT revenue. It looks like the free computers would be heading your way, not ours. Anyway, fascinating as this discussion is, we’re still looking forward to an proper expansive reply to our letter at some point.

NLA is licensing paid for services – people like Cutbot and Meltwater who copy everything on a website into a database and extract data for paying clients – typically PR officers, not private individuals. These media monitoring businesses charge a total of around £20m pa for these services in UK, and the NLA feels a fair share of that should go to the publishers who provide the content.

The traffic generated by paid for services is trivial;- Meltwater said in court that they added just 96,000 click throughs a year to the many millions of page views newspaper sites get each month. And as you’ll know, the advertising value of milions of page views (let alone 96,000) is very limited, which is one reason why so many newspapers are cutting back on employing freelance and staff journalists.

We encourage new media monitoring businesses, and most accept that copyright fees are a normal expense for a publishing business. They create content themselves, and expect it to be respected. New business is good, but if they should get get free content from NLA should Cutbot also get free computers, free rent, and free staff? Content is the property of the creator to licence as they see fit, and that right should be respected.

Nearly all the money NLA charges goes back to the newspapers and helps them protect their current busines and invest in their futures. The web licence income will probably be quite small – around £1 million a year. But we do send hard pressed UK newspapers around £20m a year from print copying. That’s equivalent to 800 staff at £25,000 pa.

Finally, the NLA – Meltwater case established that a customer of a paid for service (Meltwater) needs a licence to cover the receipt and use of copyright material. It did not address and so did not establish that clinking on links breaches copyright. Thats a scare story put round by businesses that wanted to avoid paying for content. NLA wants professional, paid for services to pay a fair share. Please keep clicking on Facebook links.

Finally we have no plans to charge free to user services, like Google and the hundreds of other consumer services.

I hope you agree on reflection that the law makes sense, and that NLA is here to support content creators, and also to provide a simple way for professional organisations to respect copyright.

Andrew

Interesting points from both sides. I understand the newspapers are looking for additional ways to generate revenue, after all it was heavily detailed in The Sunday Times the decline of The Guardian on the wekend. In addition, a business which can profit from content being created should in theory be charged something for that. On the other hand, if newspapers provide access to content for free, why are media monitoring companies having to pay for free content?

I understand the argument from both sides but I this law is ridiculous and it’s simply a farce.

Firstly, Andrew you stated the purpose of the NLA is to ensure the content creators get a fair share of the money. Writers are paid for for creating content, this content is put online by the publication who will populate the page with adverts in order to recoup and profit from this content. Surely therefore, newspapers want as many people to access this content as possible to ensure creators (and by creators you mean the newspapers?) maximise profit per article? Or does this model not work and so it’s more profitable to charge media monitoring companies?

Secondly, if the later is the case why prohibit small and emerging media monitoring companies from growing with your licensing agreements? Which as it sounds to me from Cutbot’s post that is exactly what your doing.

Thirdly, if by ‘content creators’ you mean journalists (and as a freelance journalist myself) I have NEVER received a fair share when my work is blatantly ripped off by other journalists working for other publications. In fact, I’ve received nothing not even a hello from yourselves. I personally don’t understand what you therefore do, except to take Meltwater to court.

Lastly, I now access articles on Facebook, which display a clickable title. Are the newspapers now breaking their own law? Or is Facebook breaking it for displaying these article titles? Or me for clicking on it? Facebook is one huge aggregator of content, it’s just users gathering it, not machines – is there a difference?

I wonder if you’d dare charge Google for indexing sites and displaying search results?? I also have Google Alerts set up, which I imagine isn’t that far off what these guys do. How much do you charge Google?

Personally I think this is the most ridiculous law I’ve ever heard.

NLA licences ensure content creators get a fair share of the money paid for web aggregators charge for providing monitoring services. These licences were drafted following extensive market consultation in 2008 and 2009, and accepted by most of the media monitoring community as providing legal certainty on commercial use of 1,000 websites for a reasonable fee, significantly lower than equivalent print fees.

Meltwater challenged the licences, but after extensive court review they were upheld in law, and the commercial terms were (largely) upheld in the Copyright Tribunal case. At the end of that case NLA, Meltwater and PRCA agreed the final licence terms. I am mystified that you feel these cases were under reported, as most national newspapers carried reports, as did the specialist press. A quick web search would give you hundreds of hits.

For the record we did tell you on November 6th 2009 that our case was based on the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act, which gives creators the right to object to unlicensed exploitation of their work. We work with professional media monitoring companies and users to create a clear framework for businesses wishing to use newspaper website content.

We will respond to your expansive letter separately.

regards

Andrew

andrew hughes | commercial director | newspaper licensing agency | 16-18 new bridge st, london ec4v 6ag | registered in england and wales company number 3003569

direct line +44 (0) 207 332 9359 | mobile + 44 (0) 7971 548 322 | switchboard 0207 332 9350 | ahughes@nla.co.uk|www.nla.co.uk|

I’d be surprised if anyone in those courtrooms hadn’t looked at newspaper websites for work, though, and I doubt many of them were licensed to do so.