(I know the site is still in a state but this is too important not to post quickly)
Now, here’s an interesting one, passed on to me by someone we shall call CIPRMole where basically the NLA (the Newspaper Licensing Association) want to charge organisations – starting with cuttings services then moving on to others by 2010 – for including links to newspaper stories:
The NLA has informed us that from 1 September 2009 it is introducing a new licence for web aggregator services (such as Meltwater News) that forward links to newspaper websites and for Press Cuttings Agencies undertaking this type of activity. From January 2010, the licence charges will also apply to PR practitioners and other organisations forwarding links to newspaper websites as part of their commercial activity. This will apply to almost all newspaper websites excluding News International titles and the FT.
I’ve dropped an email into the NLA, telling them about this blogpost and asking a few questions, but what I want to know is:
1) Are they targetting everyone with this? So every backlink to a paper is going to result in a charge?
2) Are they going to backdate the charging?
3) If they are only targetting companies and not individuals, why the discrimination?
4) How are they going to enforce this? Particularly on anonymous blogs or blogs hosted outside the UK?
5) Are they prepared to destroy the hits going to the newspaper websites while the BBC rakes in the hits?
6) Google Alerts and Google News are the biggest news aggregator that exist. Are they going after them or just small companies they think they have a chance of getting money from?
7) If they are collecting cash on behalf of the content generators – ie, the papers, will they put pressure on the papers to share that extra money with the original content generators – the news agencies and so on?
8 ) What about services like the Daily Dust and Net News Daily? Will you collect funds for them?
9) Do you accept that your actions may stop people linking to newspapers sites, therefore causing traffic to collapse, which could lead to more redundancies and potentially (when you factor in the decline of print editions) brands disappearing completely?
This idea smacks to me of the best of old-school thinking. I’m still processing it, so I’ll add more thoughts later, but I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts from both sides of the PR/Journalism debate as it affects everyone.
Tell you one thing, if it comes through I’d say to clients, to hell with going through NLA members, build your own networks, send your info out to interested parties and those that won’t cost you money. The more I look at this, the more it seems like the NLA wants to press fast forward on not only destroying print media but print media online too.
33 responses to “NLA goes hell for leather to destroy newspapers online with backlink charging plan”
Some people are paying for backlinks and the NLA want to charge for them?!? They really don’t get it. Backlinks are like gold, not only do they drive traffic but they’re a prime source of Google juice.
I also expect the lawyers to have a field day. Is there any ownership over a link to content as opposed to the content itself? What if that link goes via a third party URL shortener? What if it’s nofollowed?
Hopefully they don’t really mean what they seem to be saying.
Pitiful understanding of how the internet works from a desperate group of idiots.
Trevor, they do mean it. I’ve checked this morning with the CIPR. I’m as incredulous as you.
Suicidal.
All your points are valid but points 5 and 9 are the ones they should be aware of for their OWN benefits.
But their powers to claim fees for use of newspaper materials under the 1988 Act are limited to (I forget the wording, but roughly) the articles as presented on the page. Surely this would be justiciable?
@James: Ooooh, very good point. Be interesting to see what they say to that…
Everyone, the NLA are not long off the phone and have said that they’ll be posting a response to the blog post here this afternoon, so stay tuned!
The relevant part of the 1988 Act is here.
It reads as follows:
1 Copyright and copyright works
(1)Copyright is a property right which subsists in accordance with this Part in the following descriptions of work—
(a)original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works,
(b)sound recordings, films, broadcasts or cable programmes, and
(c)the typographical arrangement of published editions
(2)In this Part “copyright work” means a work of any of those descriptions in which copyright subsists.
(3) Copyright does not subsist in a work unless the requirements of this Part with respect to qualification for copyright protection are met (see section 153 and the provisions referred to there).
This aspect of the legislation was adjudicated on by the House of Lords in 2001 in the case of Newspaper Licensing Agency Limited v. Marks and Spencer Plc.
The NLA lost the case. Hoffman’s verdict, delivered on behalf of the unanimous Law Lords, included the following crystal clear verdict:
“The test is quantitative in the sense that, as there can be infringement only by making a facsimile copy, the question will always be whether one has made a facsimile copy of enough of the published edition to amount to a substantial part.”
Even re-ordered scanned pages were deemed exempt. There is no way a link to a news story could attract a legally required fee under the 1988 Act. I look forward to the NLA’s response.
Here’s a brief outline of what we’re doing and the answers to your questions. Your post has the potential to alarm so we’d like to settle some nerves.
The NLA is introducing licensing for businesses that use newspaper web content. Businesses that charge for supplying newspaper web content to businesses will need a licence and be charged from January 2010.
Newspapers’ content costs money to produce and publish, whether in print or online. A number of companies charge for providing links to this content and from January they will have to pay for a licence to do so. We make no apology for protecting the rights of the newspaper publishers.
Put simply, we are extending our existing system for print cuttings – which everyone accepts – to newspapers’ digital platforms, that is all.
We are also going to help professionalise web media-monitoring – we want to help it grow and contribute to it as a business. That’s why we are investing £2m in a new database service which will be far richer and faster than anything available today. This service – eClips web – will be available to news aggregators and press cuttings agencies.
1) Are they targetting everyone with this? So every backlink to a paper is going to result in a charge?
This is about businesses, not individuals. You need a licence if you receive online newspaper cuttings from a monitoring company or are yourself a monitoring company. Charging will start in January 2010. The charges will be low and incremental.
No every backlink to a paper will not result in a charge. That is simply untrue.
2) Are they going to backdate the charging?
No
3) If they are only targetting companies and not individuals, why the discrimination?
This is not about individuals sharing links – we think that’s great for newspapers and promotes their websites and their readership. What we are doing is making sure that newspapers are rewarded for use of their content.
If your company systematically forwards links to newspaper content online, you need to be licensed and should contact the NLA for advice. It is exactly the same as for printed newspaper cuttings, simply extended to the content on their websites.
What is defined as business use is described in newspapers’ terms and conditions – these are legally binding.
4) How are they going to enforce this? Particularly on anonymous blogs or blogs hosted outside the UK?
This is not about bloggers adding links to newspaper sites. Our focus is on professional media monitoring organisations (news aggregators, press cuttings agencies) and their client business who make extensive use of the newspaper content.
The monitoring industry is highly responsible and wants to work with us – because they want a healthy newspaper industry too. The NLA has been in dialogue with the media monitoring companies for over a year on this subject.
Most companies want to be compliant so the NLA rarely needs to take action against companies which infringe copyright. But where necessary, we do and we will.
5) Are they prepared to destroy the hits going to the newspaper websites while the BBC rakes in the hits?
The NLA initiative is designed to increase professional monitoring of newspaper content – it will not destroy traffic. Revenues from licensing will be invested in creating more content and developing the eClips web database service.
We are launching a new database service which will have complete feeds of all newspapers’ copy – eClips web. This is a wholesale product which we will provide to press cuttings and other monitoring agencies. It will be faster and richer than current scraping technologySo by doing this, we are investing in the industry so it can improve its service. This will of course trickle down into more traffic for newspapers.
We do not foresee newspapers’ online traffic being negatively affected. Traffic related to monitoring forms only a small part of newspapers’ audiences.
6) Google Alerts and Google News are the biggest news aggregator that exist. Are they going after them or just small companies they think they have a chance of getting money from?
Actually, some of the web scrapers are not small companies – they are in some cases multi-million pound operations with a global reach. Google does not charge clients for content aggregation – that’s the difference.
7) If they are collecting cash on behalf of the content generators – ie, the papers, will they put pressure on the papers to share that extra money with the original content generators – the news agencies and so on?
.The NLA is licensed to act on behalf of national and regional newspapers. The revenues we collect are distributed among these publishers who use them to invest in their businesses.
8) What about services like the Daily Dust and Net News Daily? Will you collect funds for them?
The NLA licensing scheme covers national and local newspapers. A full list is here: http://www.nla.co.uk/pdf/NLAwebsitecoverageoct1008.pdf
9) Do you accept that your actions may stop people linking to newspapers sites, therefore causing traffic to collapse, which could lead to more redundancies and potentially (when you factor in the decline of print editions) brands disappearing completely?
No we do not accept this. Let’s make this really clear – we are NOT requiring bloggers or other website owners who link to papers’ stories to pay ANYTHING. You only need buy a licence if you are sending links to newspaper articles as part of your business.
Dear NLA, thanks for that reply. I’ll leave it to others to go through point by point but I’m sure your post will settle a few nerves.
One thing stuck out to me:
Google does not charge clients for content aggregation – that’s the difference.
That’s going to be interesting to watch in these recessionary times because on one hand it means clients may actually accept less complete coverage in return for cheaper PR fees.
For example, two PR companies pitch to Joe Startup. PR A charges £2000, including full links, cuts and so on from the likes of Meltwater News. PR B charges £1500 for Google Alerts and nothing else and tells the client that the odd thing may slip through but they’ll get most stuff. Be interesting to see who Joe would go with.
It’s quite interesting your reply, many thanks. I’m sure many people will have questions in the days to come (I’m off to read the above PDF)
Craig
That doesn’t answer the question of the law, predictably. The NLA can’t just charge because they want your money: they’re entitled to do so only to the extent that the 1988 Act empowers them to do so. Try to find out what you’re actually required to pay for in law on their website: it’s not possible, because they thrive on bullying, fear and people’s uncertainty about the law.
Here’s the missing guide.
Are you scanning articles and emailing them as pdfs? You do need to pay them. Are you scanning articles and presenting those images online? You also need to pay. Are you faxing articles across? You need to pay. Are you sending links to someone, or even the plain text of an article? You’re exempt.
The list of newspapers they cover is irrelevant for these purposes. The NLA will have to identify which section of that Act they think companies would be breaching by sending lists of links to news articles. I’ve actually read the Act, and there is no clause of this sort. Flagged as empty sabre-rattling.
James’s comments about the legal situation are most interesting. I must take a look at the Act for myself.
I’m extremely unimpressed by the NLA spokesperson’s statement that “The NLA initiative is designed to increase professional monitoring of newspaper content”. It seems to me that one of the consequences of this plan, if it comes to fruition, will be to make it much harder for media-monitoring companies to compete effectively — and therefore to reduce the number of companies engaged in media monitoring. In fact, that outcome seems so obvious to me that I have to wonder whether this statement is anything more than a bare-faced lie.
>passed on to me by someone we shall call CIPRMole
Love that. In other words, a circular email to all the members of the CIPR 🙂
I’ve spoken to the CIPR and have a piece up on the Press Gazette website. I think the two most interesting issues, which you highlight, are:
a) The legal status of the hyperlink – will the concept of hyperlink (i.e., citation) as part of the ip of an article stand up. If so, there are implications for a lot of other people – such as a new ability for websites to control who links in. If not, then the new licence extension may be under threat.
b) Charging for use of hyperlinks only within the NLA client base may lead to the creation of “hyperlink only” monitoring services outside the ambit of the NLA. You mention Google alerts, but there are also more sophisticated or free services available now. That could speed the disaggregation of PR services.
Equally, existing NLA customers circulating hyperlinks not subject to licence will cannibalise the existing licensing revenue streams for newspapers. I don’t envy them.
So, more financial pressure on newspapers. My piece is here:
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=1&storycode=43823&c=1
If your company systematically forwards links to newspaper content online, you need to be licensed and should contact the NLA for advice. It is exactly the same as for printed newspaper cuttings, simply extended to the content on their websites.
One simple question: Why?
On what basis is the forwarding of links (systematic or otherwise) even remotely like the circulating of newspaper clippings?
It stirikes me that fhe two actions are actually polar opposites.
I have (a tiny modicum of) sympathy for the view that circuating clippings stops people from buying a physical copy of a newspaper.
But unless I am missing something, circulating links can only benefit newspapers, who are after all desperate for every online reader they can get!
Or am I missing something here? Is there a way for the aggregating companies (like Meltwater) to forward links so those clicking tehn do not go to the newspaper’s website and do not count on its web traffic.
Quick question..what about blogs that stop linking to sources (lets face it every single paper has the same mashed up news) and simply re-writes it and doesn’t link to anyone?
What about blogs that are breaking news and then are not linked to and copied by “newspapers”? Should they (the newspapers) not pay? – they never link to blogs..
I think people may be missing something here. This doesn’t appear to be an issue about copyright. It is simply enforcing the T’s&C’s found in all newspaper websites. Here is an excerpt from the Times Online:
10. Non-commercial Use
The Services are for the personal use of Users, or where specified, Members only and may not be used in connection with any commercial endeavours except where and to the extent specifically endorsed or approved by Provider.
The fact that publishers have been turning a blind eye (until now) to the consistent abuse of their terms is one thing, but all they now seem to be doing is imposing a licence on what people shouldn’t have been doing in the first place. What’s wrong with that?
[…] NLA goes hell for leather to destroy newspapers online with backlink charging plan | Media is Social… Kevin: Craig McGill reports: "Now, here’s an interesting one, passed on to me by someone we shall call CIPRMole where basically the NLA (the Newspaper Licensing Association) want to charge organisations – starting with cuttings services then moving on to others by 2010 – for including links to newspaper stories:" (tags: copyright newspapers revenue) […]
I’d love to see how RSS feeds fit into this – surely if a paper already provides RSS feeds of its news (most of those mentioned by the NLA do) then these are the monitors that are picked up and to which links are provided.
Madness!
Note: this is my personal interpretation
I think the key point about the NLA’s view is that they are wanting to charge within what they see as their own domain – i.e., commercial use, which means existing licensees and “people circulating links to clients commercially” who they think should be licensed such as Meltwater. Normal blogs and RSS feeds are outside that, though if a PR agency were charging for access to a private blog posting links to e.g. stories from a topic area then that would be seen as in the “commercial” domain. Ditto information from RSS public feeds. It is about who uses the information commercially, and who pays for that service. Within that area, they are trying to make supplying hyperlinks licensable.
It’s a devil of a difficult line to draw for a whole series of reasons, and personally I have doubts whether it is a viable division.
But let debate commence !
The status of hyperlinks and citations is also in play in other areas – e.g., Carter-Ruck made the New Statesman delete a list of titles of articles which it had had removed from Newspaper Websites for alleged defamation of Nadhmi Auchi.
The same argument was applied to references to the articles, as to the articles themselves. The letter is on wikleaks.
Also, the TV-Links case had a website closed for linking to pirated material, although there was an issue with the difference between a link and an embedded player.
[…] Full post at this link… […]
These batsh*t insane idiots tried billing Wikipedia for the use of newspaper links on the site. Seriously!
I do press for Wikipedia in the UK. I have not spoken to ONE journalist in the past four years who does not use Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder.
We do it for everyone to use and reuse, but it’s more than a little odious to turn around and try to bill us!
Failing that, I expect large donations to the Wikimedia Foundation from media organisations next fundraiser, as compensation for all the work we save journalists. Just ask Maurice Jarre 😉
I still don’t see how charging is backed up by law. Specifically, if someone says no, what happens? Which part of the 1988 Act allows the NLA to take that person to court?
[…] Full post at this link… […]
Use a URL shortening service instead. Problem solved.
The NLA is tying itself in knots, here and elsewhere.
Any basis for link charging under the 1998 Act seems tenuous at best and suggests that they would have claim that the link itself is the copyright work, rather than the article to which it refers. If that argument succeeds, it completely breaks the WWW, so it is doomed to failure. If they won that argument in the Lords the law would have to be changed.
However, they seem mostly to be relying on “newspaper website terms and conditions” rather than the 1988 Act. They say these prohibit “commercial use”.
Their own comment above says: “You only need buy a licence if you are sending links to newspaper articles as part of your business”, implying it is commercial PR agencies and link aggregators that they are after. They also draw a distinction between Google and, say, Meltwater on the basis that Google does not sell the links to the recipient, but Meltwater does. Hence Meltwater is deemed ‘commercial’ and Google not!
Yet at the same time they are also telling the end-user clients of those agencies and link aggregators that they will need to pay. The end user clients are anything from local authorities to pie factories. They aren’t selling links, so how are they commercial users of the links?
Any successful legal argument they use against Meltwater’s end user clients must inevitably catch Google and Google-like things, and would also permit sites to control who links to them. Both of those outcomes break the WWW as we know it, so won’t happen. If the courts apply the law in a WWW-breaking way, then changes in the law are inevitable.
James – the NLA is telling people that where the 1988 Act does not cover them
[…] questions are raised in the comments beneath McGill’s piece, including this one about copyright […]
[…] questions are raised in the comments beneath McGill’s piece, including this one about copyright […]
Speaking for the PRCA, we fundamentally oppose this. Next week, the NLA’s MD is webcasting, trying to explain his plans and taking comments from PRCA members. If anyone wants to receive a guest password for that webcats and take part, then I’d be happy to arrange. They need to understand the level of anger about this.
Enforcing terms and conditions
>10. Non-commercial Use
The Services are for the personal use of Users, or where specified, Members only and may not be used in connection with any commercial endeavours except where and to the extent specifically endorsed or approved by Provider.
May be pre-empting, and this comment may not have been approved yet (but it emailed me a copy).
The argument that they are just enforcing website T&C assumes that websites have a right to control who links to them, and what is done with that link.
Personally, I think that is as shaky a legal concept as is “the link is part of the IP of the article”.
10 Yetis Ponder NLA’s Decision on e-clippings – New Tax for PR’s…
Andy reporting in for a bit of a blog rant and questioning session.
For the last month or so I have been seeing a growing tide of some of the greatest PR Minds talking about the Newspaper Licensing Agency’s proposal to add e-clips to their armoury…
[…] Against this backdrop, Rupert Murdoch is openly musing about micropayments, the New York Times is asking whether its readers would countenance monthly subscription fees online, European publishers are petitioning regulators for more protection from Google, and, here in the UK, the organisation responsible for enforcing copyright on most national newspaper content has unveiled plans to charge aggregators for links. […]
In my day job, as communications director of a FTSE-250 plc, I have now called the NLA twice and written to them formally pointing out that I can see no legal justification for them to charge my company for receiving links to newspaper websites, and inviting them to explain their legal case. Twice over the last month they have promised that someone with some legal competence will call me back to discuss but no-one has.
Get this, NLA: sImply asserting “we are extending our licencing” does not make it legally enforcable. You can’t make it the case that someone owes you money just by wishing it so!
If they refuse to talk to me the only possible interpretation is that they know they don’t have a legal leg to stand on, and the whole thing is a giant bluff, like all those ‘fax directory’ invoices we used to get, on the assumption that big companies are busy and many may pay up in error, or to avoid the nuisance of contesting it.