The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) has long-taunted the PR sector with its baseball bat approach to managing copyright assurance. Yet having oiled its weapon in a bold bid to modernise its business for rapidly diversifying media, the rot is setting in.

It’s a topic that has stirred passions on Wadds’ blog recently. And now web monitoring service Meltwater has mounted a legal challenge to the NLA’s bid to charge licence fees for the receipt and passage of online media content, it looks like the NLA’s days – unless it makes substantial changes to its ways – are numbered.

I’ve spent a few hours wading through Meltwater’s statement to the forthcoming Copyright Tribunal. Meltwater is seeking to have the end-user licence obligation of the NLA’s new scheme removed. Doing so would render the NLA’s web licensing scheme practically impotent.

Meltwater’s approach in bringing the tribunal hinges on its insistence that end-users who receive its lists of breaking online news stories are not breaking copyright law in any way, so the NLA cannot legally compel them to pay licence fees that assure their copyright compliance.

At the core of Meltwater’s case is its belief that the information it provides to its customers is “a necessary step in the act of receiving a literary work”.

In my view, that is very difficult to argue against given current copyright legislation and the fact that the internet – and recent media trends in particular – has thrown the very intention of copyright law into question.

Meltwater’s business model is centred on ‘signposting’ news that breaks online. That is what it does. Any copyright obligations are between the publisher and the end-user, its case says.

The NLA has always tried to play piggy-in-the-middle, but that role is not longer a straightforward one. And may not even be legal, according to Meltwater.

There are many more fundamental questions covered by Meltwater’s claim to the Copyright Tribunal. They include whether URLs are part of the copyrighted literary work – how can they be, it would be the same as copyrighting paper surely? It reminds us that publishers statement terms and conditions of use on each of their web sites, so a blanket approach to managing copyright assurance is fundamentally flawed.

It makes a case for the NLA’s contractual terms being unfair and/or impractical, calling for a far lower cap on licensees’ financial liability and for the NLA to bear its own costs when carrying out on-site audits to ensure copyright adherence. And it points to the NLA’s refusal to give mid or long-term pricing assurances as being unfair.

By my reckoning the NLA’s attempt to get a tight grip on ’copyright’ licensing for changing media is at best clumsy. It smacks of desperation and the justification for its approach to online media is pretty short-sighted.

For me, there’s a broader consideration too. Print media owns copyright and so the NLA original intention of providing a service for publishers to at least recoup some of the value from others’ use of their material was spot on, even if it became more and more aggressive in its methods.

Digital content is completely different and cannot be licensed in anything like the same way. Publishers can exercise some control over how their content is used because they provide it directly to readers rather than selling it via newsstands.

The big copyright question is not how best to tax the industry, rather, the big content question is how media owners will choose to make money from their text, images, audio and video. Once that has been determined, they can manage copyright infringements themselves.

In Meltwater’s words, if the NLA scheme is allowed to continue in its current form, “the internet would simply cease to function as any publisher of online content.”

If the NLA has had its day and an article eventually appears about its demise, I might consider making a few copies.