The Newspaper Licensing Agency tells paidContent:UK it wants news monitoring companies and “content-scraping” aggregators to give it “circa 10 percent” of their revenues for the privilege. At the NLA’s estimate, aggregators and PR monitors like Moreover and Newsnow make a combined £10 million in annual revenue, meaning £1 million would be distributed back to NLA’s 1,400 member newspapers.

The wish came in an emailed statement from NLA commercial director Andrew Hughes, reacting to criticism from four news aggregators that its new online content licensing regime is an attempt to “tax the internet”. Hughes said the plan is not to charge for hyperlinks per se but to fairly redistribute some of the “the substantial revenues (aggregators) generate to the content owners”; that, he said, is “fair and proportionate”.

The statement reads: “Monitoring companies create their services by copying newspaper content into a database to find relevant articles. This is commercial use of publishers’ intellectual property and is against the terms of use for every newspaper. By licensing this activity, the NLA will legitimise this industry.”

The NLA argues that a letter circulated on Thursday—signed by Meltwater, NewsNow, the PR Consultants Association and Updatum—contained “unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims, particularly the warning that aggregators’ customers could pay up to an extra £33.474 a year.

In reality, this is the maximum the NLA charges and the price list (pdf) shows that annual royalty payments start at £86 a year. The agency says “only the very largest companies making the heaviest use of paid services will pay more than £1,000 pa”. NLA’s online license calculator advises on specific rates payable. The basic rate is 5p per article for existing print licensees and 7.5p for those without a licence—the NLA has around 200,000 existing licensees and expects most companies will pay the lower rate. Hughes adds that several aggregators support the new regime and have already signed up—more are being added today but the organisation says 3,000 monitoring agencies are as yet unlicensed. The NLA clarifies that there are 3,000 unlicensed clients of 10 pure online web monitoring companies, plus 25 press cuttings agencies

There’s a problem of semantics here: the NLA says it wants to remunerate its clients with revenues generated from the “copying” of newspaper content; but much like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News in its various run-ins with publishing groups (note the latest spat in Italy), aggregators argue they simply redistribute headlines and links, therefore driving traffic to publishers. The NLA takes issue with the industrial-scale “scraping” of content—the use of algorithms to copy entire sites to generate bespoke content feeds for paying customers.

The aggregators say the NLA has no legal basis to impose these charges, but if news monitoring services do indeed copy and re-publish sites’ entire content—albeit in very small chunks—without payment, is that really the case?

• News Aggregators Accuse NLA Of ‘Taxing The Internet’
• PR Industry Attacks News Biz Over New Scraping Regs
• Moreover May Sue Newspaper Biz Over Online Copying Levy
• Wrong-Headed Newspaper Biz Tries Again To Charge For Links