Do any of you hold NLA or CLA licences to cover photocopying, printing and emailing of newspaper, journals, magazines etc. articles within your organisations? We currently receive news items/clippings that reference our company, via our financial and marketing PR agencies (who hold their own NLA and CLA licences). Only certain named individuals can receive them but they are not permitted to email or print those articles for further distribution. We also display notices next to each photocopier to remind employees that photocopying of such material is not permitted under copyright law. We find this somewhat restrictive (particularly when we only wish to distribute articles that refer to our own company). However, we have looked into purchasing the appropriate CLA/NLA licences and have found the costs prohibitive. We would appreciate knowing about any alternative approaches that others may follow.
We have an NLA licence but last year had extended correspondence with the CLA the conclusion being that no licence is required. The key exceptions for us that meant we didn’t need a CLA licence were i) any reproduction was “insubstantial” and ii) “fair dealing” exception relating to the reporting of current events. Finally we found that the CLA never gave up on the possibility of extracting a licence fee and would not actually agree with our arguments for not needing a licence but once we stated our position they didn’t take any enforcement action.
I would expect that most companies these days access copyright material such as news articles online and you don’t need an NLA licence to look at such material online (or even print it off for personal use as long as you are not then distributing hard copies to other persons). I reached this conclusion some time ago but it took me a long time to terminate the NLA licence which was costing nearly £3,000 a year. They have a rolling licence which requires you to give notice in advance of the rollover date and in most cases I suspect the invoice just gets sent and nobody knows who has authorised the original licence (in our case it was somebody who had signed up 8 years ago and left 3 years ago. The last thing you should be doing is talking to the NLA as they will take you through a list of questions which suggest that if you so much as leave a newspaper within a sniff of a photocopier toner cartridge, you need a business licence. Because most people will browse copyright articles online (and can be directed to do so by a helpful e-mail link) you don’t need a NLA or CLA licence: so give the money to charity instead. Look at “NLA Media Access” on Wikipedia for the legal background and the European Court decision in June 2014 which found against the NLA.
We pay licence fees to both the NLA and CLA to cover us both for the receipt of press cuttings from our financial PR advisor and copying of any press cutting. I find the fee structure for the NLA licence quite confusing as you have to be very specific in knowing what you will receive (almost impossible as who knows what content the newspapers will generate!), where it is generated (i.e. national press or trade publications) how many people will receive it and how often (again, unknown!). The fee structure is also based on how many employees there are across your entire business, even though only 3 of us in head office receive the press cuttings. We pay c. £2,400 (+VAT) for an annual licence and the information I have given them to determine the fee is based on a best guess – we could be under or overpaying drastically, but as the comment below states, it’s better to have some level of protection in place based on this best guess than nothing.
The CLA has been easier and our licence fee is only based on the number of people in head office. For 11-50 employees we pay £425 (+VAT) annually.
We are pragmatic about what we circulate to such a small head office (c.20 people).
We hold NLA licenses to cover our press cuttings service – this is only for any articles that relate to our business or its products. I am not sure what is necessarily classified as “prohibitive” but my suggestion is that you discuss with the NLA as they are helpful in advising what you require, and generally, unless you are printing and distributing significant numbers of articles, the costs should only be a few hundred pounds. Better to be covered in my view than have a “stewards enquiry ” after the fact.