The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) heads to the High Court next month in a bid to settle its ongoing dispute with web aggregator Meltwater.

The NLA’s aim is to seek legal clarity on its licensing for the after market of web content. It believes that an agency or client that receives headlines, summaries and URLs, from a web aggregator or monitoring agency such as Meltwater, should be covered by a NLA licence.

Meltwater has the backing of the PRCA and believes that the NLA’s proposals for a web licence are flawed. The case is due to be heard sometime after 8 November.

If the NLA is successful the High Court case will be followed by a hearing at the Copyright Tribunal in February 2011, where Meltwater is seeking to establish whether or not the NLA’s web licensing scheme is fair to newspaper publishers and organisations that participate in the after market for web content.

Some newspaper publishers aren’t hanging around for either verdict. PaidContent reported in July that a number of newspapers were taking direct action to stop Meltwater from aggregating their content.

“The UK’s most popular online newspaper website has joined News Corp.‘s The Times, The Sun and News Of The World sites in barring the online media monitoring service Meltwater from crawling its articles, with a court action pending between UK newspapers and the company.”

Digital disruption
At Speed we’ve followed this issue for the past 12-months. It’s symptomatic of the state of the media and the disruptive nature of digital publishing. We’ve been fooled into thinking that online content is free by the NLA’s newspaper publisher members.

Up until recently these publishers have been willing to give away editorial content online for free in a bid to secure traffic around which they could build advertising revenues. It’s a model that has failed in all but a few exception circumstances.

The premise of both cases concerns what is free and what is fair. The media has hidden from these issues for too long. This High Court case is the thin end of the wedge and will surely flush out what the industry must confront.

Content costs
If business-to-business aggregators and press clipping agencies are generating an income from original content produced by a newspaper either in print or online shouldn’t they make a contribution to the original source?

We can argue over whether the NLA’s model is appropriate and how it should be applied throughout the PR supply chain but at its core the NLA is seeking to ensure that its members receive a contribution from anyone that generates income from the after market for their content.

It’s true that the income that is generated from the NLA’s web licensing scheme won’t prop up news print but the principle at stake is one of fairness. If you reuse or repurpose my content commercially I want a share of the action.

Try arguing against that point with a journalist that finds themselves out of work as publishers attempt to square-up to falling ad revenues and reorganise around a multi-channel proposition.

Google
The NLA remains insistent that Google as a consumer-facing service is not part of this debate and that its members have their own direct deals in place with the search giant.

I’m sure that this is an issue that Meltwater will challenge in the High Court. Google Alerts and Google News are almost certainly the most widely used frontline monitoring tools by agencies and brands in the UK and US.

Related articles

• Interview: Meltwater CEO Lyseggen Will Fight UK ‘Link Tax’ On Two Fronts (paidcontent.org)