Privately owned Meltwater Group is to pursue legal action against the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), following a dispute over the newspaper industry group’s intention to charge online media monitoring companies for sending and receiving Internet links. The NLA is targeting both companies providing media monitoring services and the customers subscribing to such services.
“Media monitoring services create value for Internet users similar to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing,” said Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater Group. “We use sophisticated search algorithms to help our clients find content they otherwise would have difficulties locating”.
Meltwater’s news division operates an online media monitoring service for industry professionals. According to the Norwegian software company, it monitors its client’s online coverage across tens of thousands of media outlets, bloggers, and other online influencers and provides feedback to its clients.
The NLA, who represent the licensing interests of the eight major British newspapers, is attempting to enforce licensing agreements on sending and receiving Internet links. Furthermore the licensing co-op is threatening to sue any online media monitoring company who fails to sign up to its new content licensing agreement by 1st January 2010.
The Norwegian software company said the proposed licensing fee’s are essentially a tax on receiving these Internet links.
The company is challenging the legal basis of the NLA’s licensing scheme and in particular the NLA's claim to be able to license hyperlinking. Meltwater is referring this matter to the UK Copyright Tribunal because the company believes the licensing scheme has no basis in English copyright law.
Meltwater added that it respects the copyright of the NLA's members but the licensing scheme seeks to control the receipt of links to freely published content on the Internet, even though such rights are not legally granted to copyright owners.
Meltwater is a privately owned Norwegian information service company, which delivers business solutions based on search engine technology, cloud computing, and biometrics.