As reported by Craig McGill last week, the UK’s Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) is considering charging organisations for links to newspaper articles.
On Thursday, McGill asked whether the agency would backdate charges and have they considered the impact on traffic this might have for newspaper websites.
The agency has now responded in full to McGill’s questions – including the information that it will not backdate charges and that the change is aimed at organisations and not individuals.
“This is not about bloggers adding links to newspaper sites. Our focus is on professional media monitoring organisations (news aggregators, press cuttings agencies) and their client business who make extensive use of the newspaper content,” it says.
“The monitoring industry is highly responsible and wants to work with us – because they want a healthy newspaper industry too. The NLA has been in dialogue with the media monitoring companies for over a year on this subject.”