The High Court case on whether newspaper publishers’ web content is protected by copyright law has been resolved in favour of the Newspaper Licensing Agency (the NLA).

The Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) and Meltwater News, an aggregator service, brought the case against the NLA to determine whether users of aggregator services may receive, copy and distribute newspaper web content without a license.

The judgment supported NLA’s web licensing scheme and decided that not only do copyright claims exist for newspaper headlines, but that online media monitoring services require a license from the NLA or the relevant newspapers to click on a link to an article on the newspaper’s website.

The NLA and their legal team welcomed the ruling and commented, “We hope this ruling will help ensure a fair share of web monitoring revenue for publishers and a fair media monitoring market.”

The NLA’s scheme has been referred to the Copyright Tribunal by Meltwater, and its commercial terms for both end-user and aggregator licenses will be reviewed in February 2011.