Tackling online copyright infringement

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.

The top charity fundraising campaigns by media coverage

Professional journalists working for NLA publishers have access to the NLA ClipShare service – a user-friendly archive of national and regional newspapers in text and PDF formats stretching back to 2007. ClipShare enables journalists to research rapidly the context for an article they are about to write and check previous reporting, but it is also a great tool to discover trends – as you can see from this Telegraph article published earlier this month. 

To further demonstrate its use, we took a look at the biggest charity campaigns of 2014, to see how they performed.

Clipshare and Factiva data

Using ClipShare and Factiva data, you can see that the long-established and much loved Poppy Appeal came out top of this sample in terms of volume of press coverage. 

The power of social media is also evident.  Ice Bucket Challenge was hugely effective in 2014, generating coverage for ALS and a range of other charities through influential print media. 

Clipshare and Factiva data

Clipshare data also suggests that the Royal British Legion deserves a pat on the back as it sought to increase awareness of Remembrance Sunday and charity giving for military veterans.  Press media coverage has increased two years in a row, driven by high volumes of regional coverage of the various fundraising efforts undertaken by the charity and its supporters during the annual Poppy Appeal.  

Clipshare data

As data becomes an ever more valuable resource for media, these are some of the ways in which publisher data store by NLA media access can be used.

Only journalists working for subscribing NLA publishers can access ClipShare, but businesses and members of the public can use the NLA ClipSearch database on a pay as you go basis.

Nigel Farage v Russell Brand - who won the coverage war?

The broadsheets and the public couldn’t resist last week’s BBC Question Time Punch and Judy show between the poster boys of left and right. While you can debate who won the argument, NLA’s new Article Impact Measurement can say who scores most points in the coverage debate.

Top of the pops was in the Guardian, with 217,808 page views, followed by the Independent  (author Nigel Farage) with 169,434 for its comment piece. The Telegraph – not perhaps the natural home of the Brand fan – came up third with 105,898 views.

Twitter clearly drove a lot of the traffic, with Independent leading the way with 252 tweets in the first 24 hours, with 169 for the Telegraph piece and just 112 for Guardian. Perhaps this says something about overall site traffic that GDN ‘won’ with least social media activity? Or is it that Guardianistas use Facebook these days?

You can play with figures and it would take someone more expert than us to tell the story. NLA’s AIM is designed to let  the experts do that. We do the data. We can also tell you the most viewed article last week was not Punch or Judy, but the Telegraph’s photo montage for Miss World. Some things never change.

For more about AIM see http://blog.nla.co.uk/about-aim/

Andrew  

Trend spotting with NLA Clipshare

The wealth of publicly available data accessible online is an increasingly important source for insightful journalism, as readers of The Guardian’s datablog, the Daily Mirror’s Ampp3d and other data led news websites will know.

NLA media access is a contributor to this trend.  Regular readers of this blog will have already heard, for example, about the launch of our Article Impact Measurement (AIM) tool for Media Monitoring Organisations and their PR industry clients last month. 

But if you are a journalist using the NLA research service Clipsearch (www.clipsearch.co.uk) to review our database of national and regional newspaper articles you may not be aware that this tool can be used for data gathering and trend spotting too.  By looking at changes in volume month on month you can spot trends in reportage, the emergence of new buzzwords and coverage of topical issues rising and falling over time all the way back to 2006.

Take this example from Raziye Akkoc at the Daily Telegraph.  She uses NLA Clipshare (the sister service widely used by journalists on national titles) to chart the increase in stories about immigration, demonstrating that it is a hotly debated topic in print media which has doubled in mentions since the same time last year.  Over the coming months NLA media access will be demonstrating on this blog some examples of how data can be used, drawing on our growing repertoire of print and online content from publishers.

Happy Anniversary for Magazines and NLA media access

It is now just over a year since NLA started licensing magazine content. On Wednesday night we celebrated the anniversary at the RSA with publishers, industry colleagues, and media monitoring service providers. A year in, how are we performing?

Licensing is going well and we are experiencing impressive growth, quarter upon quarter, in both gross revenues and client take up.  We are confident this will continue to improve as we learn more about magazine content and client requirements. 2014 has been a successful transition year for NLA and publishers. The income we generate from licensing now helps fund jobs for journalists in both the newspaper and magazine sector.

The first year highlights have been;-

• £2.6m (gross) collected for magazines in our first year. We are currently on track to deliver £3.7m in 2014.
• Over 3,500 organisations of - which 1,000 are net new - have been licensed – reflecting NLA’s deeper penetration of the business sector. These include the full spectrum of large multinationals through to SMEs.
• Organisations understand and accept the logic of the extension of NLA licensing to magazines. Magazines have been added seamlessly to our existing licence structure.
• NLA have introduced new licences for magazines, including our public use licence (CWRL) which has been a convenience for users and has generated significant new revenue for publishers who have opted into it.

• An additional 75 publishers joined the NLA from April 2014 and NLA now represents over 180 publishers, and over 2,000 print and web titles.

We are now focused on what we can bring publishers and licence users in 2015. Expanding the magazine content in our eClips service to deliver higher quality clippings faster to users earlier is the next target. We already have four magazine publishers on eClips and expect many more in the coming months. We know clients appreciate full colour, high quality clips, especially from the glossier magazines in fashion.  We also hope to continue to add significant new titles to the core licence, and to build the depth of licensed offerings.

So it was a happy anniversary for the magazines NLA partnership, with a lot more to look forward to.