The Wardman Wire

I’ve just had a news piece published over at the Press Gazette, about a move by the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) to charge its customers for use of hyperlinks to News Articles in the same way that they charge for use of the article clippings themselves.

The NLA is a body owned by the major newspaper publishers, which licenses use of articles clipped from 1400 newspapers and magazines by News Monitoring Organisations and PR agencies for use by themselves and their customers.

Traditionally clippings have been physical copies of articles. More recently they have been digital scans or PDF files. Now articles are being referenced more often by merely the hyperlink to the public website of the newspaper concerned.

The problem for the NLA is that hyperlinks are unregulated and can be used freely, which cuts into the revenue stream for the NLA, and therefore that of the newspapers who provide the clippings. This is not small beer, since clippings raise about 20m ukp a year for NLA members.

Therefore the NLA is attempting to increase the scope of its licences to cover its customers circulating hyperlinks; in effect they are trying to make the hyperlink be part of the article.

I think the two most interesting issues are:

a) The legal status of the hyperlink – will the concept of hyperlink (i.e., citation) as part of the ip of an article stand up. If so, there are implications for a lot of other people – such as a new ability for websites to control who links in. If not, then the new licence extension may be under threat.

b) Charging for use of hyperlinks only within the NLA client base may lead to the creation of “hyperlink only” monitoring services outside the ambit of the NLA. You mention Google alerts, but there are also more sophisticated or free services available now. That could speed the disaggregation of PR services.

Equally, existing NLA customers circulating hyperlinks not subject to licence would cannibalise the existing licensing revenue streams for newspapers.

I don’t envy them.