More uncertainty for link users
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

As the New Year dawns, most news aggregators have caved in and agreed to pay the Newspaper Licensing Agency's new charge for links from 1 January. But pockets of resistance remain and there does seem to be some uncertainty as to how to react to the NLA's stance.

By mid December the NLA had reached agreement with almost all press cuttings agencies and web aggregators over the licensing from 1 January of paid-for business-to-business monitoring of web content - although its announcement did not say how much progress it had made with licensing their clients' use of links.

Meanwhile the newspaper publishers that own the NLA have written to the remaining aggregators threatening them with legal action if they do not comply (http://digbig.com/5bawjh and follow links). Faced with this threat, the UK aggregator NewsNow has taken the decision to pull all affected links to national newspaper web sites from its subscription service, although links to NLA member publications will remain on its free service, which is not currently affected by the new rules (http://digbig.com/5bawjj).

However NewsNow is also the founding sponsor of Right to Link (http://www.right2link.org/), a new campaign which it hopes will become broadly based enough to oppose restrictions on the use of links generally. Meanwhile the Norwegian based software-as-a-service company the Meltwater Group has referred the NLA's scheme to the United Kingdom Copyright Tribunal (the section of the UK Intellectual Property Office that adjudicates on licensing issues), claiming that it has no basis in English copyright law (http://digbig.com/5bawjk).

But the NLA has expressed confidence that it will win, and has published links to a handful of precedents in support of its case (http://www.nla-web.co.uk/ and follow links), including one previously covered in LiveWire (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22684). Reaction to the NLA's proposal was largely negative when it was first announced - not just predictably from the aggregators (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e23924) but also from at least one intellectual property lawyer (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e25207).

But the trade web site paidContent:UK seems to have changed its stance; although it initially said that it saw no justification for charging for a web link (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e21244), it has subsequently acknowledged that the NLA is licensing not the links but the selling of them, and that that may be a reasonable thing to do (http://digbig.com/5bawjn). But the situation continues to create uncertainty for the aggregators' business-to-business clients, who are also affected by the new rules.

A Copyright Tribunal decision may eventually provide clarification - but its decisions are few and far between (http://digbig.com/5bawjp), and there's no guarantee that they'll be particularly quick either.

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