By Mike King
It is good to see a company challenging the NLA’s latest attempts to squeeze more cash out of the PR industry. Meltwater, a company that, among other things, provides online media monitoring services, is challenging the NLA’s right to charge a licence fee to allow it to forward links to free online news content.
Condemnation of the NLA’s latest money making scheme is pretty widespread across the PR industry, and has been since these new charges were first announced. Not that being unpopular is anything new for the NLA. It has always existed on the basis of an aggressive stance and threats of legal action against anyone that didn’t pay up.
Even by its own standards, the NLA is taking things to a new level. To me, it doesn’t appear that the NLA has much of a case in forcing companies to buy a copyright licence if they want to forward links to free content. Particularly when the online news sites that the NLA represents already actively encourage their readers to forward the same content to other users via ‘share this story’ links.
The NLA says that it draws a distinction between readers and ‘news aggregators’. We’re not a news aggregator, we’re a PR agency that simply sends links to relevant news stories to our clients. Of course, the NLA says we will also have to pay for the privilege of forwarding links to free content.
Interestingly, some legal opinion states that there is no copyright over hyperlinks. Maybe, just maybe, the days of the NLA are over. We can only live in hope.
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