If you have any further questions, feel free to email [email protected]. You may also find the below links useful.
NLA’s Annual Report 2018
NLA’s Code of Conduct
Membership Rules
Guide to copying, copyright and licensing
How NLA royalties are calculated
NLA Royalties Charter
How NLA licenses UK businesses
NLA’s Publisher Mandate
FAQs
Our full name is NLA media access Ltd. The company was originally set up as the ‘Newspaper Licensing Agency’ (NLA) in 1996 by eight British national newspapers, who are equal shareholders. Since then the NLA has been selling copying licences for newspaper content, as well as providing data feeds of publisher content to Media Monitoring organisations.
In 2013, the NLA started licensing magazine content as well as newspaper content. The Professional Publishers Association (PPA) recommended the NLA to its members, and over 150 magazine publishers – over 40% of the market by value – have already signed up with the NLA
It’s not! If a company wants to make a copy of one of your articles, instead of purchasing a second issue or subscription, it is only fair that as a publisher you receive some form of payment. Rather than you having to search out people making illicit copies, or deal with endless ad hoc requests to do so, the system of collective licensing by an agency such as the NLA facilitates broad copying licences and ensures royalties get back to the appropriate publisher.
Before you get too excited, it’s not quite free money… The NLA administration fee is currently:
- 17½% of revenue generated for national publishers.
- 21% of revenue generated for regional and some overseas publishers.
- 20% of revenue generated for the PLS from the licensing of magazine content
- 25% of revenue generated for some overseas publishers
The PLS also takes a 6% fee for administering your mandate and royalty processing and distribution.
You may also incur costs associated with additional payments to freelancers, depending on your contracts with them. These charges are applied before your royalties are sent to you. If you don’t want to pay these charges, you can of course monitor and charge for copying yourself, directly, but most publishers don’t have the resources to do this cost-effectively or comprehensively. At least get in touch and let us help you weigh up the pros and cons.
The amount of royalty revenue you can earn depends entirely on how much your magazine or newspaper content is being copied. This will vary by title, by season and by trends. When you get in touch, we can give you a better estimate, and if you are a magazine publisher, we can also check if there are legacy royalties that the PLS have already collected and put by for you.
If you’re a UK magazine or newspaper publisher, then it’s very likely that you’ll be able to benefit from signing up. We do review each publisher on a case-by-case basis, though, and if for any reason we don’t think it’ll work for you – perhaps because your content is only relevant to the educational market (which the NLA doesn’t usually work with) we’ll let you know.
The Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS) is a not-for-profit organisation set up by the UK publishing industry to represent publishers in collective licensing and secondary rights management, both on and offline. The PLS is the body which obtains the necessary mandates – or instructions – from publishers and authorises licensing agencies such as NLA to license publishers’ rights on a collective basis. PLS analyse the royalties collected by NLA and distribute them to publishers strictly in accordance with the level of copying shown in survey data. For the scheme to work, you have to join the PLS – as over 3,000 publishers already have. They distributed £33.5m in net royalties over 2012-13
Some magazine publishers are already signed up with the PLS and receiving royalties which have been collected by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA). NLA have more business licences and licensees than CLA, and CLA have more education licences and licensees than NLA. Even if you accept the NLA proposal, the CLA have special strengths in educational licensing and (via PLS) will continue to represent your title in that sector. In most cases we expect NLA to deliver greater gross royalties to you from business copying than you might have been getting from the CLA. PLS can inform you about what you have been receiving from CLA and direct you to the appropriate source should you require further advice.
If you’d like to learn more about content licensing, copying and royalties, please contact [email protected]
If you are a newspaper publisher, you can register directly with us by contacting the Publisher Services team
If you are a magazine publisher register with the Publishers’ Licensing Services (PLS), the industry body that aggregates and distributes royalties to magazine publishers. Confirm to the PLS that you want the NLA to be the licensing agency for your royalties.
And that’s it! Payments are made by BACS from the PLS or NLA on a monthly basis.
It is unusual for people to request copy permission but if they do you should refer business users to the NLA, and education sector users to the CLA. Syndication (republishing) requests are best dealt with by you.