Copyright Lawyer: Newspaper Biz Wrong To Charge Non-Profits For Links

The Newspaper Licensing Agency is wrong to demand that non-profit public-sector organisations buy its licence for internally sharing news hyperlinks, according to intellectual property lawyer Robin Fry of law firm Beachcroft.

He argues in a report (pdf) that the new NLA licence — which in January is extended to cover the online distribution of news articles — is incompatible with copyright law because non-commercial sharing of links should be allowed.

Fry writes that “simply circulating hyperlinks to relevant articles is not an infringement of copyright of the article itself” and that non-commercial use should be free and unlicensed.

But the NLA disagrees: commercial director Andrew Hughes told me that organisations such as local councils and NHS Trusts (many of which already have licenses) will have need a licence to internally distribute online articles to comply with newspapers’ terms and conditions that the NLA upholds. “The NLA position on that is that is commercial use and we are extending the existing NLA to cover it at no extra cost,” he says.

Fry told paidContent:UK: “Although the NLA are desperate to generate income from the electronic distribution of press cuttings… they can’t do it under copyright law and their position has been destroyed by the papers’ websites allowing them to share content.”

He argues that because online articles generally display “click to print” and “email a friend” icon the papers are inviting users to share it both on and offline, making subsequent copyright claims invalid. Fry also accuses the NLA of not giving the “complete copyright position” to customers.

Small scale licences in the public sector (prices for that start at £86) are not the NLA’s main aim here: it wants the new rules to “legitimise” what it calls “content-scraping” commercial news aggregators which copy entire newspapers sites’ content and re-sell it as a newsfeed to paying customers. Even Fry admits that industrial level aggegators are legally suspect, though he maintains that less professional sharing should be allowed for non-profit organisations.

Despite opposition from some aggregators, Hughes reveals the NLA has signed up another seven of them to the new licence terms. They are: Digital Media Services, Durrants, MediaGen, Precise Media, Press Data, PressIndex and the WPP-owned TNS Media Intelligence.

Comments have been disabled for this post