The Public Relations Consultants Association (that’s the PRCA to you and I) has started to take action against the Newspaper Licensing Agency. It has created a petition calling http://act.ly/d1 on the NLA to abandon their plan to charge organisations which forward snippets of newspaper articles or the URL to the article.
If you’re not familiar with the NLA’s plans then sit down. If you send a clip of an online newspaper article to a client then the NLA will charge you. If you send an email along the lines of “Dear client, Event X has made newspaper Y. You can read the preview at http://www.example.com/newspaper/” then you’ll also be charged.
We’ve had a copy of the email the NLA originally started to send out. Here it is for you;
The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) is the UK newspaper industry’s licensing body that grants your business the permission to lawfully reproduce newspaper content internally. A licence from the NLA will allow you to copy what you need, whilst protecting from copyright exposure and ensuring that legal obligations are met.
A licence is required when:
- Reproducing any newspaper content. This includes photocopying, faxing and digital copying (scanning, emailing, hosting on an intranet site)
- Copying of content from a newspaper website
- Reproducing newspaper content received from a Press Cuttings Agency (PCA) or a Public Relations (PR) company. This includes:
- Cuttings viewed via a PCA’s website that are printed or digitally copied
- Cuttings viewed via a PCA’s website by more than one person
- Photocopying / digitally copying content that is sent by a PR company
- PR agencies that supply newspaper cuttings to clients. This also includes allowing client access to your PCA service
Please read the enclosed information and ascertain if there is any reproduction of newspaper content within your organisation. Should copying take place, then a licence is a legal requirement in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988.
I look forward to your response.
A number of thoughts popped into our mind when we read this. First off; “What’s a newspaper?” For example, the Hearst publication the Seattle Post-Intelligence was once a paper newspaper and now it’s online only. If that was a British publication then would that count?
We’ve also spoken to journalists about this. Questions like; “Wait… I’m not getting any of these royalties. Are these being collected on my behalf?” were common.
The PRCA_UK are pretty clear in their response. The petition ends with;
This is money for nothing and we must unite against it!
The petition has been set up on the Twitter based Act.ly site. One of the features Act.ly offers is a supporters button. If you’d like to display the call to action on your own blog then simply use this code.
<script src=”http://act.ly/widget/firebox/d1″ type=”text/javascript”></script>
August 11, 2009
Newspapers