PRmoment reports today on the PR professionals that are blogging, campaigning and petitioning to fight Newspaper Licensing Authority’s new web licence proposals

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Stephen Waddington, managing director of PR agency Speed, has been stirring up the debate about the NLA’s proposals on Twitter, where there is also a Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) Twitter petition for the NLA to scrap these new charges. Waddington has also blogged extensively about the subject.  He says that one of the problems is caused by the NLA not adequately making clear how the new license works, leading to the PR industry becoming fixated with the idea that URLs should not be licensed. He explains: “This issue is not about licensing URLs; the PR industry has jumped on this headline because the NLA has failed to properly explain the issues that its members face, and the rationale of the new licence.”

“The legal argument of commercial versus non-commercial use of web content is sound and the licence stacks up in the context of the social web. If you are scrapping or recording content from a website and not providing links back, you should expect different terms from social web users.”

Waddington believes the problem is that the NLA is attempting to create a licence model too late, and attempting to fit it to a structure that is too large and complex. He says: “Retrofitting a licensing model on an open network is flawed and fraught with loopholes. For example, the NLA isn’t pursuing Google because it claims Google News is not a genuine substitute for a professional media monitoring service, yet in my experience it is the PR industry’s frontline web clipping service.”

Waddington states that self-certification combined with ad hoc audits is the only way that the NLA will be able to enforce the new licensing fee. He concludes: “The web licence will go ahead but technology will ultimately dictate the conclusion of this debate.”