Meltwater to challenge NLA web licensing via UK Copyright Tribunal

Meltwater customers received an email this morning in which Meltwater says that it is challenging the NLA web licensing scheme via the UK Copyright Tribunal. This is likely to take as long as 12 months during which Meltwater says that it will continue to serve links to its business-to-business customers.

The full text of the email follows below:

Dear Meltwater Customer,

You may or may not be aware that the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) recently decided to extend its hardcopy licensing regime to cover links to newspaper website content. The NLA believes that you (our customer) need a license from the NLA in order to click on the links you receive from the Meltwater News Service. Meltwater strongly disagrees with this and has announced today that we are taking the NLA to the UK Copyright Tribunal to challenge what we consider to be a “link tax” without legal basis.

The NLA, originally formed in 1996, was created to license and collect revenue from the copying and clipping of print media. Now the agency is attempting to enforce licensing agreements on Internet links. The NLA is targeting both companies providing media monitoring services and the customers subscribing to such services.

Meltwater is pursuing this legal action after the NLA threatened to sue any online media monitoring company who fails to sign up to its new content licensing agreement by January 1. 2010. We have been in good faith discussions with the NLA for several months now, but have been unable to come to an agreement. While Meltwater respects the copyright of the NLA’s members, the licensing scheme seeks to control the receipt of links to freely published online content, even though such rights are not granted to copyright owners under UK copyright law. Therefore, Meltwater has decided to take this matter to the UK Copyright Tribunal because we believe that the NLA’s licensing scheme has no basis in UK copyright law.

It may take 9 to 12 months for the Tribunal to come to its decision. In this period, Meltwater will continue to serve you with links to relevant news stories and we will continue to do our very best to meet your needs.

For more information regarding this issue, please refer to our press release and the FAQ in the attached PDF.

If you have any questions regarding Meltwater’s challenge to the NLA’s unreasonable licensing scheme, please feel free to contact me at jorunn.ekestad@meltwater.com.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support.

Kind Regards

Jorunn Ekestad

Director Client Relations UK

jorunn.ekestad@meltwater.com

Also posted on www.speedcommunications.com

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1. At 24 Dec 2009 09:44, shak wrote:

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2. At 24 Dec 2009 09:45, shak wrote:

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3. At 9 Jul 2010 21:01, www.philipsheldrake.com linked here:

...Meltwater to challenge NLA web licensing via UK Copyright Tribunal...