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Saulo Santana
Berlin & Potsdam, Germany
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Irish newspapers want to charge license fees for links

This is not a joke.

This is how Simon McGarr, an Irish layer, started a post about attempts by the Irish newspaper industry’s licensing body to charge one of his clients a fee for linking to newspaper content.

I couldn’t believe on that, until I read the statement released by the “National Newspapers of Ireland” where they expect websites to pay to link to one of their members.

According to McGarr, the prices are something like this:

1 – 5 €300.00
6 – 10 €500.00
11 – 15 €700.00
16 – 25 €950.00
26 – 50 €1,350.00
50 + Negotiable

We have seen lot of experimentation going on in the media when it is about new methods of making profit from content, like the leaky pay-walls at the New York Times or the API licensing at The Guardian. But its unbelievable how some in the industry, like this group of 15 newspapers in Ireland, seemed determined to accelerate the process and speed up the deaths of their publications.