A growing publisher force

Publishers are active in asserting their position regarding copyright content. Rupert Murdoch went on record earlier this year to say that the destiny of News Corporation's newspapers is in paid-for content saying, "We are on the cusp of a digital dynasty in which our company and our shareholders will profit greatly". Mr Murdoch believes that consumers want content on a range of devices, and are willing to pay. LATEST NEWS: Meltwater, which has taken the NLA to the Copyright Tribunal has this week (w/c 15th March) been blocked from indexing Times Online, a NewsCorp newspaper title.

In the UK, the Financial Times has announced that it will extend its corporate licence for FT.com to cover the FT newspaper as well from July 1^st 2010. That effectively means that the FT is withdrawing its mandate from the NLA to licence their content. Instead, they will only offer direct licences at a minimum of £2,000 per annum for up to 10 users. Content will continue to be available through media monitoring or evaluation companies, as long as the end user is licensed. The FT strategy is to develop direct relationships to better understand user habits that they believe will better enable them to sell additional products and services to those customers.

Australia has a version of the FT situation, with Fairfax Business Media titles (including the Australian Financial Review) being excluded from press clipping licences in late 2006. (Factiva and other aggregators were also locked out.) In response, Media Monitors Pty Ltd produced abstracts of Fairfax Business Media articles for its clients. Fairfax fought back, bringing a test case against Reed Elsevier's ABIX abstracting service (essentially the same as Media Monitors'), challenging the use of the original headlines and by-lines. The case was heard in the Federal court in September 2008, with the parties making further submissions last July. A decision is expected in the first half of this year.

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