Article in Private Eye (Music & Musicians, pp 13 of #1313, May 4) indicates German newspapers and magazines have got hard nosed about quotes from their pages. Recently Frankfurt Opera had to pay Eu7000 for quoting from a review of a performance on its website.
According to the
Newspaper Licensing Agency Quote:
Newspaper content offers a rich and valuable resource to any organisation, whether you monitor press coverage or are simply gathering intelligence.
The Newspaper Licensing Agency provides organisations with permission and access to newspaper content when and how they need it.
That's permission to copy and access over 1,500 titles either direct, using Clipsearch or via your media monitoring agency.
So if you quote you should have a license and it costs £100 to quote from an article and use it on the web for a year.
Will British and US papers be far behind? Can TTA take advantage? Other than authors who might use our reviews does anyone quote from Interzone or Black Static?
If you allow critics free access to a performance, or reviewers a free book then I don't see why you shouldn't quote freely from the resulting report. If they pay for access or the book it's, maybe, a different matter.
As no one quotes a poor review the need to pay means the critic, or his employer, are - to some extent - under pressure to increase potential income by praising where they might otherwise damn.