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June 29, 2021updated 30 Sep 2022 10:25am

NLA Media Access: Content licensing and copyright protection for publishers

By Press Gazette

*Partner content

NLA Media Access is the UK’s leading organisation providing content licensing and copyright services.

It works on behalf of the UK’s newspaper and magazine publishers by licensing organisations that make paper or digital copies of newspaper, magazine and website content. NLA represents more than 280 publishers and licenses more than 200,000 organisations and more than 50 media monitoring organisations.

Set up by UK national newspapers in 1996 to represent their copyrighted content, NLA operates under the Copyright Designs and Patent Act, 1988.

The licensing body has been supporting publishers since its birth by returning over £450m to publishers in royalties.

While its core activity remains collecting licensing fees for the use of news industry content, the NLA also performs a number of other vital functions for publishers.

NLA Media Access services include:

Clipshare:

A searchable research tool that gives newspaper and magazine publishers access to an archive of articles from over 200 titles dating back to 2006. This is a unique and invaluable desktop tool used by thousands of journalists and librarians.

Text Tracker:

News content is systematically scraped and hosted on fake news sites every day. NLA created Text Tracker to monitor cases of copyright infringement and remove those cases on behalf of publishers. Since the tool’s inception in 2015, Text Tracker has removed over 500,000 infringed articles across thousands of domains. Text Tracker has been instrumental in supporting publishers to remove fake news and cloned/scam websites.

Text Feeds:

A publisher who adds their content to the NLA eClips database can request an XML feed of their own work back to them for archiving purposes or sent to third parties to support syndication opportunities.

Agent for Publishers:

Newspaper, magazine and digital-only publishers can generate new revenues through commercial partnerships with text aggregators. Over twenty publishers now mandate NLA to manage agreements with text aggregators directly to seek more transparency on content usage and reduce the burden on managing agreements with multiple partners.

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