Yesterday NLA media access co-hosted an industry roundtable event looking at what more publishers and organisations representing rights holders can do to tackle the threat of online copyright infringement.
The event brought together representatives from across the creative industries covering music, book, film, TV, magazine and newspaper publishers, with the industry regulator (the IPO) and PIPCU, the City of London Police’s dedicated copyright enforcement team. The roundtable was expertly chaired by Mike Weatherley MP, author of three reports on copyright in this parliament and until earlier this year the Prime Minister’s adviser on intellectual property.
It also provided us with an opportunity to share our own experiences with the wider creative industry, and also learn from the experiences of others. News content abuse is rife online - from a typical sample of five newspapers over a 7 day period, over 13,000 articles were copied across c. 800 domains.
At the event we exhibited NLA’s Online Article Tracking System (OATS), launched in 2013 to support publishers in tracking and finding pirated content. A year on from its launch, OATS is already proving a valuable resource to publishers. Five national newspaper publishers have contracted us directly to identify and manage communication with the infringing websites on the publisher’s behalf, saving the publisher both time and resource. To date, we have contacted over 500 domains with a 75% success rate of removal of infringed content.
We know that the challenge is huge – most abuse online is by organisations with either no money, no understanding of copyright, no respect for copyright or a combination of all three. But regardless of how great the challenge is, we believe in our responsibility to do what we can to support publishers online. Not only that, our continued work demonstrates to anyone thinking about pirating online content that we will respond to misuse, and that copyright matters.
If you are interested to find out more about our work with OATS, please contact George Shepherd, Publisher Relations Manager at gshepherd@nla.co.uk.