The current legal argument between the UK’s Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) and online clippings company Meltwater and the UK’s Public Relations Consultancies Association (PRCA) awaits a final tribunal decision later this year.

The NLA has won every legal conflict it has so far encountered, so one would assume that they are fairly confident about the result of the next tribunal.

While most PR agencies and companies will simply sigh and pay up if the deferred web fees become due later this year because of a positive decision (from the NLA’s point of view), the implications of such a decision are potentially far-reaching.

As I understand it, a decision in the NLA’s favour will effectively mean that the NLA can go to any company distributing URLs that link to media websites and demand payment for the distribution of those links. What does this mean for the business models of Google, Ask, Microsoft Bing, etc? Surely search engines provide a similar service to clippings agencies, and the NLA could therefore go after each of these with the force of legal precedent behind them? Why are Google and Microsoft not involved with fighting this case? Given that the NLA has the support of the IFFRO – if the NLA wins, then we can expect to see this approach start to go worldwide.

The NLA is only interested in clippings and URLs that originate in the UK (i.e. that are sent to companies from UK-based clippings agencies). But NLA-like organisations are starting to spring up in other countries – PMG Pressemonitorin Germany for example has been quite aggressive in recent months. It takes a different approach to the NLA, and requires a contract with every company for which an agency is collecting clips, or it simply demands that the clippings agencies stop sending clips to the PR agency.   

There is the potential here for international organisations to become liable for tens of thousands of pounds in fees every year to receive clippings. For example, a company with a $60 billion turnover and 100,000 employees in 75 countries could, at a rough estimate, be liable for over £250,000 in fees to copyright enforcement agencies like the NLA. The next step of course would be for all those big organisations to simply stop using local clippings agencies.

So why are the clippings agencies and big business not also supporting the Meltwater and PRCA case?

Let’s assume the NLA wins. Then most major organisations stop collecting clippings from local clipping agencies and use the services of an online clippings service that initiates the clips in somewhere like the Cayman Islands which does not have an NLA-like organisation.

At that point the news organisations would lose their income stream and the global clippings business would collapse.

The only winner would be the Cayman Islands, with some serious data centres and massive internet pipes to carry the sudden upsurge in low cost provision of fee-free online clippings traffic. Now there’s a business model worth considering…

Lyle