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 ..

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)

About the Author: Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and managing director of domain registrar and hosting company Blacknight. He blogs mostly over on michele.blog

3 Comments

razhael January 7, 2013 at 8:31 pm - Reply

RT @blacknight: Newspaper Licensing Ireland “Clarify” Position: http://t.co/Ob3RcNj7
simon January 9, 2013 at 3:21 pm - Reply

Thanks for the article. If a business website, i.e. a commercial one, was to write a top ten stories of the week/ month style blog that included a headline, url and line of text (all fully attributed) where does that fall on this murky spectrum?
- Michele January 9, 2013 at 8:54 pm - Reply
  
  Simon
  
  That’s the problem. It’s not at all clear to me how they view that kind of usage.
  Bear in mind that there is no concept of “fair use” under Irish law at present. I would hope that the current copyright review resolves this and other issues in a positive and constructive fashion, but it’s not a given
  
  Thanks for your comment
  
  Michele