Find out more about Business Licence coverage and how it can protect your business
The licence gives organisations the right to re-use extracts from millions of published digital and print publications, including articles supplied by media monitoring agencies. It provides protection against the risk of copyright infringement and includes an indemnity against legal action and the associated costs. The licence offers a simple solution to copyright compliance so you can research, innovate and create with peace of mind.
If you are a PR firm, marketing agency or similar and you want to provide copies of news and current affairs articles externally to clients, you need CLA’s Media Consultancy Licence. Providing electronic or hard copies of articles or links by email is not permitted under the standard CLA Business Licence; without the Media Consultancy Licence or direct permission from the rightsholder, your firm could be exposed to the risk of copyright infringement. This includes forwarding clippings and web links received via Media Monitoring Organisations to your clients.
There are a number of reasons, why the Check Permissions tool might display an amber result. Sometimes the ISBN has not been added to the CLA database yet and there is no information on the title or permissions status available yet. We have designed a simple interactive step-by-step guide, which you can download here. This will help you work out whether copying is permitted if the result is unclear. If you are still not sure, please let us know and we’d be happy to help. For the most accurate results, we recommend that you search by ISBN or ISSN if you have it.
It is not necessary to have a CLA Licence to share a weblink or URLs, but you may need a licence or check the terms of use of the website if you want to copy and/or share any content from the website. Some URLs are opted into the CLA Licence – you can check this on the Check Permissions tool on the CLA website but entering the URL, in which case you may copy and share content from the website with your students. If a website allows you to use their material, for example under a Creative Commons, you can choose to make copies under the website’s user terms rather than the CLA Licence. Read more about website republishing here.
CLA & NLA licences are complementary but represent separate publications and therefore organisations making ad-hoc copies from a variety of media will invariably find they will benefit from holding both licences. NLA media access provide cover for newspapers and some magazines. The CLA licence covers millions of publications including books, journals, trade magazines, periodicals, law reports, and many digital publications and online content including ‘free-to-view’ websites. The differences between CLA and NLA licences coverage is explored here. You can be reassured that there is no overlap between CLA and NLA magazine cover and in all cases a title is either represented by CLA or NLA.
We cover more than 17 million publications including books, journals, trade magazines, periodicals, law reports, many digital publications and online content including free-to-view websites. Because we cover so many titles, and because we update the list all the time, we are unable to provide a full list as it is cumbersome and impractical for customers to use. However, we do have an online check permissions search tool that you can use to check any specific title, and this can be found on any page of our website. It lets you search for a publication by title, author, publisher, ISBN, ISSN or URL and displays all the permissions associated with that publication.