Commercial director of the Newspaper Licensing Agency, Andrew Hughes, responds to criticism of the body's business model

In his blog earlier this week David Benigson of Signal suggested newspapers and NLA media access were missing a trick by not adopting a Spotify-style model – low cost, high volume – for news aggregators. A challenge is always welcome, and new ideas ditto, but I’m afraid David is not on a winner here.

A little bit of context might help first. NLA fought a four-year battle with Meltwater through the courts to establish the principle that paid-for use of newspaper web content is protected by copyright and the fees we proposed were reasonable. We won, and have established one of the very few licensing systems for web content. Without that win, the debate could not even start.