NLA digital MD commercial director Andrew Hughes told me Friday: “This is not about having a go at bloggers: it’s about large, commercial operations which are scraping the entire content of tens of thousands of websites and creating paid-for services from them.” He named Meltwater, which offers clients a searchable database of 90,000 online news sources in more than 110 countries, and Moreover as offenders in the “content scraping” sector. We understand Moreover is mounting “a large response” in the coming months.

It’s not the first time Moreover publishing model has come under fire: in October 2007 AP sued the company for publishing excerpts of news reports “without permission and infringing on the news organization’s copyrights and trademarks”, though the case was settled in August last year. In May an investment group led by former AOL (NYSE: TWX) business development SVP Paul Farrell bought out the company from US network infrastructure company VeriSign (NSDQ: VRSN) (release).

Hughes says the NLA is happy to be “part of the web economy” and that it encourages outbound linking to improve its members’ traffic. But, while general linking is allowed, even welcomed according to Hughes, creating links via the industrial-scale copying of articles from newspaper sites, for private commercial purposes, breaks those sites’ terms and conditions and the new rules are designed to either stop it or ensure the copyright owners are compensated.

NLA is planning its own eClipsweb aggregator. Touted as an alternative news source for the PR and comms industry, it is under development and will go live in January. A steering group consisting of MDs from several national newspapers has been working on the idea for 15 months and Hughes says it will differ from existing aggregators by getting news feeds directly from publishers’ production systems, without scraping, allowing for more accurate and full data.

Last week, Press Gazette reported the NLA will “regulate hyperlinks”, but the organisation—via a comment on our story—says it’s not trying to stop blogs, news sites or even Google (NSDQ: GOOG) from linking to newspapers’ online content.

Update: Andrew Hughes contacted us to point out that the agency is willing to work with aggregators. He says: “eClips web is designed as a wholesale service for web aggregators - not a direct user offering”. He says the NLA wants to “work with aggregators, not against them”, as it does with its print news database, and adds that the NLA has a “long track record of adding value for intermediaries”.