Meltwater and Nexis lose Times content
Jinfo Blog

27th March 2010

By Penny Crossland

Item

News International seems to be continuing in its mission to prevent other news organisations from crawling the web for its content. In January, we reported that aggregator NewsNow (http://www.newsnow.co.uk) had been blocked from linking to content from The Times (seehttp://www.vivavip.com/go/e27712 ); now media monitoring company Meltwater (http://meltwater.com/mnews/) has joined the list of those banned from indexing the Times Online. As paidcontent reports (http://digbig.com/5bbhhh), this means that Meltwater’s customers will not know when their organisations are mentioned in The Times – reducing the depth of coverage the company can offer its clients. Unsurprisingly, Meltwater does not intend to accept The Times’ action without a battle. Back in January, when the Newspaper Licensing Authority (http://www.nla.co.uk) introduced its two licenses charging web crawlers and, separately their clients what many have called a “link tax” (see Tim Buckley Owen’s postings at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e23924 and http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27877), Meltwater challenged the legality of the scheme by going to the Copyright Tribunal ( http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ctribunal/ctribunal-about.htm). In a press release issued in December 2009, (http://digbig.com/5bbhhp), Meltwater stated that the NLA’s licenses were “essentially a tax on receiving internet links”, which the company considered to be “unjust and unreasonable” and “contrary to the very spirit of the internet”. Although the Copyright Tribunal has yet to pronounce on this case, Meltwater has won a small victory in that the tribunal has at least allowed it to go ahead with its challenge. Responding to the Times Online move last week, Meltwater described the move as “surprising and disappointing”, in that News international had not waited for the Copyright Tribunal to rule on the case. The press release goes on to state that the Times’ move was “just the latest development in the ongoing copyright discussions in the UK market, a discussion that is far from over”. (http://digbig.com/5bbhhn). The Tribunal’s ruling will be awaited by many with bated breath. In a related move, we heard yesterday that News International had decided to withdraw all its archived news content, i.e. The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World from the Nexis online service, probably starting from June, when the paywall is introduced. (http://digbig.com/5bbhhm). Factiva, owned by Dow Jones, which is part of the Murdoch empire, will continue to provide access to News International Content. With the recent announcements of the paywall introduction in June (posting on this to follow), it seems that News International is not worried about losing friends.

« Blog