Both Meltwater and NewsNow are standing firm in their opposition to the NLA web licensing scheme.

Meltwater has referred the issue to the UK Copyright Tribunal while NewsNow has reluctantly removed links to NLA member sites from its’ paid for products. Both have signed up to the Right2Link campaign.

In a statement on its web site the NLA says, “While we respect their right to take this action, we are confident that the Copyright Tribunal will recognise that the NLA’s approach has been measured and reasonable.”

The CIPR and PRCA both remain opposed to the scheme. The PRCA has publically applauded Meltwater and has said that it is giving “serious thought” as to how it should respond.

I caught up with Struan Bartlett, Chief Executive, NewsNow and Jorn Lyseggen, CEO, Meltwater at the end of last year to better understand their opposition to the NLA scheme.

Q. What’s the difference between charging for links and providing a service whereby links are aggregated and served to customer on a paid-for basis?

NewsNow: […] The Right2Link campaign is about protecting the right to link. That’s not the same thing as saying that you can never charge for access to a service that contains links to other sites – if you did that any news site with a paywall like FT.com or WSJ would soon be out of business. The right to link means not needing permission from or being charged by the linked-to website. NewsNow’s paid-for services are no different to FT.com’s or WSJ’s in the respect that they will all contain links to relevant third-party websites. NewsNow demands the same journalistic freedoms that news outlets demand for themselves.

Meltwater: If a source has a pay wall we only spider and index the source subject to an agreement with the source. It is usually an arrangement where we are allowed to index, and when a client clicks on a link to an article from this source he ends up at the subscription/log in page of the source. We basically market the content behind the pay wall, and our clients will not get access to the content unless they are a subscriber with the source.

Q. How will you adapt your service to respond to pay walls?

NewsNow: We already link to many websites that employ pay walls. We link to them exactly the same way as free-to-access web sites.

Meltwater: We have agreements in place with a substantial numbers of subscriber sources, including the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Q. Have you calculated the gross cost to your business of paying the NLA its proposed dues under the web licensing scheme?

Meltwater: The cost of the NLA license directly billed to Meltwater is £10,000. The cost the NLA wants us to enforce on our customers amounts to about £1,000,000.

NewsNow: We have and it’s not just the immediate costs of the license but the indirect costs on us of policing their scheme and the downstream uncertainty over costs and continued availability of publications in the scheme. The license purports to offer aggregators certainty but it doesn’t. In its current form it doesn’t offer any certainty whatsoever.

Q. Is the NLA eClips database a threat to your business?

Meltwater: The license terms of the alleged NLA license states that we are to disclose all client data to NLA. On the other hand NLA reserves the right to, at any time, to make the decision to directly compete with Meltwater selling their eClips Web feed directly to our clients. Meltwater welcomes all competition, also from the NLA, but then it has to be on a level playing field. We are not willing to disclose all our client data to a potential competitor.

NewsNow: The NLA hasn’t provided any guarantees that it won’t compete. There is a fundamental conflict of interest where a collective licensing body – that is insisting you give it your customer list – can’t guarantee it won’t be providing services in the market. Various clauses of the NLA licence already provide the NLA with advantages it could use to unfairly undermine industry members’ competitive positions, while providing the veneer of plausible deniability.