Your questions answered

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.

Buying one of our licences provides you with blanket permission and avoids the need to contact the authors and publishers each time you want to make a copy, providing the published content is covered within our repertoire. You can use our Check Permissions search tool to find out if you're covered.

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.

Your licence comes with valuable website republishing rights so you can post published articles and reviews from publications on your own website and benefit from the publicity of positive press and reviews or support your new product launch to give your business a boost. Your licence allows you to post up to five articles (at any one time) per year on your own website from participating print magazines and publisher websites.

No. We only license published content on behalf of our members who represent authors, visual artists and publishers and we do not represent the social media accounts of individuals, companies and other organisations.