No way José – or NLA
Jinfo Blog

3rd October 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

News aggregators have been up in arms over Newspaper Licensing Agency plans to charge them for web-based reuse of news from the start of next year. But now a commercial law firm has suggested that the NLA’s attempt to demand payment on newspaper hyperlinks may be invalid. In his report No Way José (summary and link to full report at http://digbig.com/5bajtx) Robin Fry, an intellectual property lawyer at Beachcroft LLP, argues that the circulation of hyperlinks cannot be an infringement of copyright. Following a string of queries from baffled clients, Fry’s advice seems unequivocal: ‘It's quite possible for organisations to access all their press cuttings at no cost whilst staying within the law’. In essence, Fry’s argument goes as follows: There is copyright in newspaper articles, reproduction of press cuttings generally does require consent and the NLA does appear correctly to control this. However the NLA’s rights have it seems been controverted by the newspapers’ own websites, which do allow print and email delivery – so rights to demand fees for downloads by employees from newspaper websites may therefore be defective and invalid. Fry also criticises the NLA, saying that it has ‘a responsibility to explain the correct legal situation to those it seeks copyright fees from’. At the moment, he claims, many are entering into licences – and possibly paying backdated ‘indemnity’ fees – without really understanding if these are needed for their business. Naturally, the NLA disagrees – in particular with Fry’s view that the non-commercial circulation of links by public bodies should be free and unlicensed. ‘The NLA position on that is that is commercial use and we are extending the existing NLA to cover it at no extra cost,’ its commercial director Andrew Hughes told paidContent:UK (http://digbig.com/5bajty). Unsurprisingly, the NLA move provoked a fair degree of indignation when it was first announced – certainly as regards charging the clients of the aggregators, if not the commercial aggregators themselves (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e21244). And a small group of aggregators subsequently condemned it in a joint statement as a ‘blatant and unjustified attempt to tax the internet’ (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e23924). Beachcroft’s legal guidance is a useful and indeed welcome contribution to the debate from some end users’ point of view. But for any information manager trying to plan and cost their future service – especially when times are tough – the continuing uncertainty is less than helpful.

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