CorpComms Magazine

This article is in response to former NLA chairman Dominic Young's article on the NLA/Meltwater case.

What we are challenging - along with the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) - is the reasonableness of the terms on which the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) requests an additional licence from all end users of all media monitoring organisations (MMOs) for simply receiving a search result and subsequently clicking on a link to read an online newspaper article on a publisher's website.

The High Court and later the Court of Appeal found that all end users need this additional licence on the grounds that the search results they receive in the reports are subject to protection under copyright.

In addition, the Courts found that the copies made on a computer when receiving an email, and again when the search results appear on the screen of the users, are not covered by the temporary copies exception.

We believe that this is exactly what the temporary copies exception should cover, and that the judgment on this point is fundamentally wrong. It means that anyone sending, receiving or viewing a webpage via a link they have been sent is in breach of copyright unless they are licensed to do so.

This means that millions of UK professionals will unwittingly infringe copyright legislation on a daily basis - this clearly goes against the very fabric of the Internet. We strongly believe that this was not the intention of the law, and that the interpretation by the Court of Appeal is wrong. We have therefore asked the Supreme Court for permission to appeal the point of temporary copies.

There is a fundamental difference between the nature of these unavoidable transient copies created when you visit a website on which a rights holder has elected to publish his work, and a malicious attempt to copy someone else's copyrighted works.

Furthermore, the pricing the NLA announced on the launch of the licence was in our view unreasonable given that all end users were doing was receiving search results and clicking on links to read articles on public sites.

After Meltwater and the PRCA challenged these prices and the NLA's right to change them at will, the NLA clarified that its intention was to raise them by up to 570 per cent by 2014.

The Copyright Tribunal was held last month and will rule in the coming weeks on the terms of the licence. We are confident that the verdict will recognise and support our objections.

Our intention is to always work with publishers to develop mutually beneficial solutions, as with our Financial Times partnership. Unfortunately, out-dated copyright legislation could be counter-productive, which will only harm UK publishers and, in turn, the UK economy.

We have received a tremendous amount of support and goodwill from our clients and our competitors, as well as people within the media and publishing sector. They understand our rationale and that we are acting with the best interests of the UK at heart.

Click here to read NLA managing director David Pugh's article on busting online copyright myths

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