Benefits of a CLA Business Licence

A CLA Business Licence empowers, protects and supports your organisation.

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The licence can be extended to fit your specific industry needs.

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Helps minimise the risk of copyright infringement across your organisation.

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Saves time and money with fewer individual permissions requests and invoices to manage.

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Access to digital tools, extending the value of the licence.

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  • Make copies from publications from the UK and 39 international territories.
  • Copy and circulate press cuttings or fee-paid documents in digital or print form.
  • Share content with employees across your organisation.
  • Post up to five articles (at any time) a year on your website.

Strengthen your copyright policy

Advocate ethical and responsible content use across your business. Contact our team to discuss the best licence for your organisation.

Contact us

Copy, Right with CLA

40 years of excellence

  • CLA is regulated by the government as the collective licensing body for the reuse of text and images from books, journals and magazines.
  • CLA is a member of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI).
  • As a not-for-profit company, CLA distributes revenue back into the creative industries helping to ensure that rightsholders are fairly remunerated when their works are used.

Do your employees share published content at work?

Our Copyright Licence for businesses is required if any of your staff make copies from any of the 16 million-plus print or online publications that CLA represents. Making copies includes scanning, emailing, uploading to a central server, sharing press cuttings, emailing a journal article or even making a photocopy or scan from a book or trade magazine.

Virtually all published content from print or digital sources is protected by copyright. This means you must make sure you have permission to use it at work, or you could be infringing copyright law - see 'Complying with copyright'.

According to a recent survey of businesses around the world, the rate of work-related content sharing has tripled since 2016.
49% of that content is being sourced externally and is likely to be shared by executive-level staff compared to management.
Yet, 47% of professionals recently surveyed are unaware of their organisation's copyright policy or unsure of its details.

Protect your business

CLA Business Licence minimises the risks of copyright infringement by providing blanket permissions. The cost of this licence is based on the type and size of your business. Check out our pricing here.

Start your enquiry

Business Licence extensions

We have developed sector-specific extensions to the CLA Business Licence tailored to the sector’s needs. Be sure to speak to the team when discussing your licence and the right options for your business.

Hotels & conference centres

Permits guests to make copies.

Law

Send copies to clients, barristers, advisers, judicial staff, and more.

MCL

Empowers PR and media agencies to lawfully share content with their clients.

MMO/Media Evaluation

Permits sending copies and snippet links to clients with specific terms including data reporting.

Pharma & medical

Permits the sharing of licensed copies between organisations holding relevant CLA and CCC Licences.

TDM

Coming soon

Training

Make copies for delegates

Useful links

Do you need a licence?

Information on copyright

Licence documents

Licence information pack

Supporting tools

CLA Check Permissions Tool
Check Permissions works for all, even if you don’t have a licence. Use it to check whether the CLA licence covers an article, book, or website.
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From the first engagement, I was astonished as to how helpful and reassuring they have been to us and clients with every engagement. I think that there is stigma about copyright in our industry, and we have found that embracing licencing has not been the headache it’s sometimes reputed to be.

TANK logo
Trevor Palmer
Owner/Director - Tank PR

Working in the health sciences arena it is essential that we respect and credit copyright ownership: having the CLA as a resource and advice centre helps us to do that efficiently.

PharmaGenesis
Cate Foster
Senior Project Manager/Editor

From the first engagement, I was astonished as to how helpful and reassuring they have been to us and clients with every engagement. I think that there is stigma about copyright in our industry, and we have found that embracing licencing has not been the headache it’s sometimes reputed to be.

TANK logo
Trevor Palmer
Owner/Director - Tank PR

Our experience of working with the CLA has been very good - efficient processes, swift and helpful responses from our account lead, James Charleston.

CLA Circulorum
Robert Davies
Head of Marketing & Communications - The Royal Institution

Business Licence FAQs

Find out more about Business Licence coverage and how it can protect your business
On each occasion, you may copy a chapter of a book, a single article from a periodical, or up to 5% of a publication, whichever is the greater. For digital publications such as websites that are not conventionally structured, you should ensure that copying is limited to small extracts that are equivalent to these limits.
Any UK employee in your organisation, including individual consultants or agency workers, can make and receive copies. Any overseas employee in your organisation can receive digital copies (intranet and email) for viewing only (unless your company holds a CLA Multinational Licence).
CLA has agreements with similar agencies in most major overseas territories enabling International publications and content to be copied under the CLA Licence. For full details of these overseas agencies and the countries that are covered please visit cla.co.uk/international/territories
You can make copies when you have one of our licences.
Many major magazine titles can be copied under our licences – further information about reusing this kind of content here. Some magazines are licensed by NLA Media Access. You can see if you are covered to copy from any magazine by using our Check Permissions search tool. Permission to copy content from national or regional newspapers is granted by NLA Media Access.

Gov.uk

What the government website says about us

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IPO

Discover more about intellectual property and copyright law

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