The UK Court of Appeal issued a ruling upholding the original High Court judgement in favour of the NLA in November 2010. The court confirmed that commercial consumers of web content need a licence from the publisher to view content.

Web licences
In the case of UK newspaper publishers licences are issued by the NLA. Conceivably other licensing agencies could be created to police niches on the internet where web content is shared for commercial gain.

The Court said that the technological process of displaying a web page on a computer is not exempt from copyright.

“This positive interpretation of UK copyright law provides legal clarity and certainty for all players in the market,” said David Pugh, managing director, NLA.

“Publishers can be sure of fair royalties for the use of their content, suppliers of paid-for online monitoring services will benefit from a level playing field and clients of such services know that their licence provides a simple way to guarantee compliance with the law,” he added.

Meltwater and the PRCA are seeking permission to appeal this decision to the UK Supreme Court.

Personal versus commercial
The issue remains between commercial monitoring and personal usage. Google as a consumer search engine falls outside the NLA licence scheme.

“The NLA has dodged taking on Google because of size. Any solution that excludes Google is ignoring its massive presence in the industry,” said Ingham.

The story will continue at the Copyright Tribunal in September when Meltwater will seek a ruling on the fairness of the NLA’s licensing scheme.

“We are confident that the Copyright Tribunal will rule the NLA licensing scheme is over-reaching and unreasonable,” said Jorn Lyseggen, CEO, Meltwater.

In the meantime if you’re an agency or company that uses a commercial monitoring service such as Meltwater you’d be well advised to set aside fees for when the NLA comes seeking backdated settlements.

“We’ve advised PRCA members to set aside fees from the outset,” said Ingham.

You can calculate the likely cost to your organisation by using the NLA Web Fee Calculator. By my reckoning a 10-person agency sharing 100 links a week should expect to pay £300 per year, while a 50-person agency sharing 500 links a week should expect to pay £1,260 per year.

Content costs but who pays?
The root of the challenge to the NLA licensing issue lies in its newspaper publisher members fooling us into thinking that their content is free on the internet. In the 90s business models were set aside in the race for eyeballs as newspaper publishers made their content available for free.

Steve Kuncewicz, social media and intellectual property lawyer at HBJ Gately Waring LLP has gone further in media interviews today. He told The Drum that the ruling is a bid by the newspaper industry to retain revenue while the traditional publishing model fails.

Ultimately this on-going case must surely hasten a review of intellectual property law in the UK. It’s a point that Kuncewicz makes to The Drum.

“There’s a widening chasm between how we use the internet and the law. We’ll look back at this debate in five or ten years’ time and it will be a tiny parenthesis in the history of copyright in the UK,” said Lyseggen.

Speed is a Meltwater customer and a member of the PRCA.

Related blog posts:

• NLA ruling “absurd” says Cambridge IP Professor as Meltwater and the PRCA head back to court – 6 June, 2011
• Tackling copyright confusion and why Google isn’t a British firm – 20 May, 2011
• Meltwater expected to appeal High Court decision on NLA web licensing – 10 December, 2011
• NLA’s High Court ruling contradicts Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of net neutrality and an open web – 29 November, 2011
• NLA vs Meltwater: See you in court – 28 October, 2011
• NLA seeks High Court ruling on Meltwater challenge to web licensing – 24 May, 2011
• Links: a means of distribution, not an economy – 18 January, 2011

Tonight the PRCA organised a debate at the British Library with representatives from all of the parties concerned and an audience made up of professionals from the PR and media industry.

University of Cambridge IP Professor Lionel Bentley didn’t pull any punches when he called the original High Court ruling absurd. He said that on the same basis any headline, or title of a book or movie, has copyrighted status.

Bentley is by no means a lone voice among the legal community on this issue. I caught up with Intellectual Property & Media lawyer Steve Kuncewicz (@stevekuncewicz) of HBJ Gateley Wareing after the High Court ruling last year.

“This case only adds to the need for copyright reform to deal with businesses that are looking to thrive in a knowledge economy – if this judgment holds up, then the NLA will have a monopoly that even the old system couldn’t have intended. Meltwater would have to change their business model and PRs avoid sending aggregated versions of the coverage they generate,” he said.

The NLA Web End User Licence scheme as it stands would see everyone involved in distributing or receiving links on a commercial basis (monitoring agency, aggregator, agency and client) pay a levy. It is an attempt to prop up an old business model in a very limited way.

Google Alerts is excluded from the scheme as it is free at the point of source.

The NLA scheme is supported by its newspaper members, the majority of which outlaw the commercial distribution of links from their sites in their terms and conditions. Yes traditional media needs to protect its IP and build new business models but in 2011 when those same publishers increasingly rely on their audience to freely share and circulate content it seems increasingly outdated – and is almost certainly an application of the law in a way that was never intended.

The panel discussion kept returning to the fact that we’re at a time and a place where technology and digital media is ahead of business models, and more crucially the law. In that sense next week’s case in the High Court could be the start of the reform the UK’s archaic copyright laws.

Professor Ian Hargreaves made a start when he delivered his report on the UK’s IP framework last month. The Government’s response is expected later this month.

When I caught up with Meltwater’s CEO Jorn Lyssegen after the event he was philosophical about the forthcoming court battle that his firm is leading.

“We’ll look back at this debate in five or ten years’ time and it will be a tiny parenthesis in the history of copyright in the UK,” he said.

The PRCA should be congratulated for organising tonight’s event; the views of the PR industry continue to be well represented on this issue. And Meltwater as a lone voice among clipping agencies and aggregators deserves credit for leading the challenge, as does the NLA for turning up and openly debating this issue.

The case will be heard in the Court of Appeal between 15 and 17 June. Following the Court of Appeal, which will decide on elements of law relating to the proposed licence, a Copyright Tribunal hearing will be in September will determine the fairness of the proposed terms of the licence.

You can search the Twitter hashtag #focdeb for conversation from the event and a video replay of the full debate will be posted by the PRCA in the next few days.

The topic was raised tonight at the PRCA’s Future of Content debate. You can search the Twitter hashtag #focdeb for conversation from the event.

The panel debated whether user generated content could ever replace traditional journalism, which led very quickly to a discussion about trusted sources.

But I think that misses the point.

Yes Twitter has rolled over numerous injunctions and broken major news stories such as the death of Bin Laden. But for every example of where Twitter has broken a story there are countless where it is used to push propaganda.

There’s a reason that the quote, attributed to twentieth century US progressive and politician Hiram Johnson, “that truth is the first casualty of war” is a cliché. It is an accurate observation and applies as much to today era of user generate content as it did in the 1900s when Johnson is claimed to have first delivered the infamous soundbite.

Here’s Mary Beth Sheridan citing a recent example of this issue last month in The Washington Post.

For weeks, Syrian democracy activists have used Facebook and Twitter to promote a wave of bold demonstrations. Now, the Syrian government and its supporters are striking back — not just with bullets but also with their own social-media offensive.

Mysterious intruders have scrawled pro-government messages on dissidents’ Facebook pages. Facebook pages have popped up offering cyber-tools to attack the opposition. The Twitter hashtag Syria — a label that had been used for accounts of the protests — has been deluged with automated messages bearing scenes of nature and old sports scores.

“There is a war itself going on in cyberspace,” said Wissam Tarif, head of the Middle East human-rights organization Insan, whose website has been attacked.

User generated content may have a role alongside the reporting for news events. But it is easily manipulated for good and bad, and can never replace the integrity of professional journalism.

The internet has torn down all barriers to publishing. Undoubtedly that is good for democracy.  But at a time when anyone can become a publisher, the skills of a journalist in closing the gap between the source and the story, and rigorous fact checking are more critical than ever.

New digital media entrants, without the shackles of a print business, have shown that it is possible to build a business model to support professional journalism, and some traditional media organisations are making efforts to build sustainable models.

The business model to support professional journalism is changing, but it’s not dead and crucially neither is professional journalism.

Photo: Rubble at Quneitra, Syria (watchsmart via Flickr).

A news room environment is part of the culture at Speed.

Two of our crack newshounds John Brown (@brownbare) and Matt Watson (@mpwatson) will be sharing how it enables us to generate proactive coverage for our clients at an upcoming PRCA breakfast.

They’ll aim to tackle that thorny issue of how you keep a client in the news when it hasn’t any news at 830am on 17 February.

Join them as they talk about how to react quickly to breaking news stories and create compelling content. Expect some great insight, top tips and case studies.

I was keen to get his view on the recent High Court judgement that found in favour of the NLA’s web licensing scheme.

Steve believes that Meltwater will appeal the judgement and that it could result in a reappraisal of copyright law to deal specifically with the Internet. In his own words:

“Copyright law has always been about the ability to generate an income out of intellectual ability. However, there’s a growing tension between the old copyright model and the new digital world – this decision is based on a ruling from the European Court of Justice that an 11-word extract from an article can be protected by copyright as a ‘literary work’.”

“For years, it’s been argued that a headline alone can’t be protected as a literary work because it’s simply too short – try telling that to journalists who’ll argue, with some justification, that coming up with a headline that connects a piece to its audience isn’t as skilful and worthy of protection as the article as a whole.

“That said, this ruling created a dangerous precedent by taking the strict letter of the law and applying it in a way which simply doesn’t fit with the business model of a whole industry.

“Although the ruling may be strictly correct in legal terms in that fair dealing can’t be used as a defence without a proper acknowledgement (which Meltwater don’t provide), this puts the PR industry in a very difficult position if the decision holds up, but the idea that this kind of linking to a URL that contains a headline is very dangerous – the PRCA has been dragged into a major dispute between publishers who see monetisation of content as the only way to generate revenue and a news aggregation service which is seen as the enemy by UK copyright law due to the fact that they provide a commercial service rather than links provided in the public interest.

“This case only adds to the need for copyright reform to deal with businesses that are looking to thrive in a knowledge economy – if this judgment holds up, then the NLA will have a monopoly that even the old system couldn’t have intended. Meltwater would have to change their business model and PRs avoid sending aggregated versions of the coverage they generate.”

“The legal principle is established: end-users need a licence to use paid-for media monitoring services incorporating newspaper web content. We will now proceed to the Copyright Tribunal [in February 2011] for a ruling on the commercial terms of both our web aggregator and end user licences,” said David Puge, managing director, NLA.

Paid Content has produced a summary of what the ruling means for PR agencies – NLA Ruling Summary: How PRs break copyright law online.

According to the Media Blog, the ruling effectively affords inbound internet links a copyrighted status that would require any businesses circulating them to obtain a licence from the NLA.

Meltwater and the PRCA are expected to appeal Mrs Justice Proudman’s ruling.

“[The] decision is fundamentally flawed – it risks putting an end to the freedom with which information can be shared on the Internet. In the coming days we will work with our lawyers to examine the grounds for appeal,” said Richard Ellis, communications director, PRCA.

Here’s an ironic twist. In a rallying cry in Scientific America last week Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Brit that invented the web, called for the defence of open standards on the internet, taking issue with threats to neutrality and an open web, ranging from iPad applications to traffic shaping and from social networks to packet-level snooping.

It will be sometime before the media develops business models that see journalists and publishers properly rewarded for the publication of online news. Until then the NLA licensing scheme will remain a contradiction between the vision set out by Sir Tim Berners-Lee of an open web and the ability for a news publisher to generate sustainable profits online.

There are two fascinating postscripts to this story that might be worth exploring following the High Court judgement.

As Jason Stammer writing in the New Statesman says newspapers are increasingly using search engine marketing techniques to attract the attention of Google. A timely story about a frequently searched for brand will guarantee traffic to an online news site as readers seek out information about the brand. But newspapers don’t have to pay anything to brand owners for use of their brand.

Similarly stories that are second sourced via the web are becoming commonplace and are easier than ever to track a story online to its source. PR academic David Phillips has traced the lineage of news content as it spreads across the web. As Phillip’s says we’ve yet to see a counter organisation to the NLA set up to get their money back from newspapers that source content from online communities.

“AMEC actively supports what the CIPR is doing to help it’s members better understand the importance – and the changes – which have taken place in PR programme management and measurement,” said AMEC Executive Director Barry Leggetter.

I’ve blogged about past criticism of both the CIPR and PRCA in the past but here is another example of the strides that are being taken to professionalise our industry.

According to the CIPR’s president Jay O’Connor the new research, measurement and planning approach will be incorporated into the CIPR award scheme from 2011. It has already been included the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) and training scheme.

Almost two-thirds of PRCA PR Leaders’ Panel welcomed the budget, despite only just over one in ten thinking it would have a positive impact on their business in the short-term.

All respondents predict the public sector will lose communicators over the next year, with over 90 per cent predicting that the public sector will also use agencies less. In contrast, PR Leaders expect private sector use of agencies to increase over the next twelve months.

The majority of respondents (86 per cent) foresee no cuts in staff numbers as a result of the budget. But longer term, more than half of respondents, said that they expected to see a reduction in the number of PR and communication professionals over the next three years.

The results are supported by news yesterday from communications group Creston. It reported a revenue fall of 4 per cent up until March 2010.