If Meltwater wants the Copyright Tribunal to review the terms of our web licensing scheme, then they should, in fairness and in law, first take an NLA licence.

“The vast majority of press cuttings agencies and aggregating services have already agreed to the new licensing structure and are now licensed. Meltwater is an exception. By remaining unlicensed, it has a competitive advantage over other monitoring agencies and has created uncertainty for clients. All monitoring agencies should be on a level playing field.

“We are confident that the Copyright Tribunal will recognise that our web licensing scheme is measured and reasonable.”

The NLA, which aims to generate B2B revenue for the publishers that own it and which has long required fees from agencies that copy printed news cuttings for PR clients, this month implemented two controversial new digital requirements…

—Media monitoring agencies that offer paid web news alerts services to - like Precise, Meltwater and Newsnow - must pay between £5,000 and £10,000 per yer (depending on their revenue and size of client base).

—The services’ end users must also pay from £58 a year for receiving those articles.

The new requirement has been interpreted by opponents as a philosophical “tax” on hyperlinks. Charges are being levied because, even though the agencies only supply their clients with headlines and summaries of stories, they effectively make copies of the articles in order to process the stories as such, the NLA tells paidContent:UK.

The NLA is not charging consumer web news aggregators like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News because they do not sell a service to customers, a spokesperson said. But individual newspapers’ discontent lingers toward The Big G. Either way, there is a philosophical battle going on, instigated against established, revenue-losing news publishers toward users they think might cough up.

NewsNow also tried forming a campaign to fight the licenses, but ultimately decided to remove NLA members’ content from its paid service rather than pay for the license. News International is not signed up to the NLA’s new web licenses, but its Times Online, Sun Online and NOTW.co.uk are now unilaterally blocking NewsNow from crawling them, we revealed.