Newspaper Licensing Ireland “Clarify” Position

Reading the newspaper: Brookgreen Gardens in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Simon McGarr has been writing extensively over the last couple of weeks about Newspaper Licensing Ireland and the Irish tradition media’s views on copyright. The story has gained a lot of traction and has garnered considerable coverage in the international press, both traditional and digital.

Earlier today he posted an update which highlights NLI’s “clarification”.

Here’s what they’ve published:

Statement on behalf of Newspaper Licensing Ireland Limited regarding use of newspaper content

For personal use: NLI never requires or requests a licence for personal use of newspaper content.

For commercial use: NLI does not require a licence from any organisation which only displays or transmits links to newspaper content. A licence is required when there is other reproduction of the newspaper content, such as display of PDFs or text extracts.

6 January 2012

What’s not clear to me is where the line lies between “personal” and “commercial” use.

It’s also not clear what a “text extract” is.

If you quote a line from an article does that mean you have to pay a license fee?

Is the headline of an article a “text extract”? (Linking to articles without text is kind of hard!)

I suspect this story isn’t over yet ..

Related articles

• Dinosaur alert: Irish newspapers desperately trying to charge for links [GigaOM] (paidcontent.org)
• Linking to newspaper websites for profit needs licence, says NNI (independent.ie)
• Update: Irish Newspapers Will Now Be Ignored (eogn.com)
• Irish Newspapers Want To Pass A Law That Would Mean Anyone Who Links To Their Articles Would Have To Pay (businessinsider.com)
• National Newspapers of Ireland deploy the survival instincts of the Dodo… (sluggerotoole.com)
• Irish Papers Charging for Links (insideview.ie)
• Ireland copyright battle: Newspapers demand $400 for sharing links (rt.com)