TL;DR

NLA Media Access, the licensing body that represents 14,000 UK titles, has launched a free service that combines traffic data from participating publishers to identify organisations scraping their content, Press Gazette reported on 29 October. Those caught will be offered a licence or face legal action backed by the NLA, and its chief executive expects a collective case within 18 months.

Seeing across many sites

The Collective Intelligence Advisory Service rests on a simple idea: a scraper that looks like an ordinary reader on one site gives itself away when activity across many sites is compared. Chief executive Henry Jones offered an example. A visitor posing as an iPhone user who reads 400 Telegraph articles might just be a devoted fan, but if the same visitor also reads 300 pieces on a Newsquest title and 200 on the Guardian, “it almost certainly is a bot”.

Jones said many scrapers ignore robots.txt, the voluntary protocol sites use to turn automated crawlers away, and some disguise themselves as human visitors. The service extends the NLA’s Text Tracker, which Press Gazette says has removed more than 150,000 infringing items so far this year, including over 40 whole sites.

Sign or sue

A pilot with Newsquest and three national titles, the Telegraph among them, turned up firms in Eastern Europe and Asia-Pacific that had assumed they could take content freely. Jones said some responded to a challenge by asking for licence terms. The NLA already sells scraping licences with tight limits on how the material may be used. “If you’re stealing content from one publisher, you might get away with it, but if you’re doing it on 14,000 titles, then we’re well placed to go after them,” he said.

He expects most cases to settle after pre-action letters, but predicts some organisations will resist, leading to formal collective action. Pooling cases, the NLA argues, makes litigation cheaper than publishers suing alone.

Looking Forward

The launch lands amid a wider fight over how AI companies gather news content. Jones cited Meta, which he said quickly delayed planned terms after international publisher bodies objected and has promised a full consultation; we covered the separate complaint to the CMA over those terms last week. In our view, the NLA’s bet is that evidence is what publishers have lacked: robots.txt carries no legal force, but a documented pattern of cross-site scraping gives smaller regional titles leverage they could not muster alone.