In 1843, amid fierce debate around Britain’s controversial Corn Laws, The Economist was founded to support the cause of free trade. Ever since, the title has ploughed its own furrow in the global media landscape, with a model centred on high-quality journalism that is rooted in analytical rigour and a reverence for facts.

Today, that editorial content is exclusively available to The Economist’s 1.2m active subscribers, whether they gain access to online articles via the title’s ‘hard’ paywall or they are counted among more than 500,000 readers of the hard-copy product (or newspaper, as it has always been known).

While print retains robust appeal, digital channels are increasingly important within The Economist’s paid-content mix. Indeed, the group’s most recent results point to 13% year-on-year growth in digital subscribers for the 12 months ended 31 March 2023.

Intellectual property under threat

In this increasingly digital world, however, the brand’s intellectual property – its intelligent writing – has faced a growing threat in the form of online copyright theft. Instances have been uncovered where content that should have remained within either the paywalled website or the pages of the magazine has been copied and republished without authorisation.

To tackle the issue, The Economist has signed up to the Text Tracker service from NLA Media Access, outsourcing the task of identifying and taking down such copied content from infringing websites.

Text Tracker answered a problem that the publisher knew had been ‘bubbling away’ in the background, but one that it also knew was difficult to gauge and to police effectively. Sometimes, it was the newspaper’s own loyal, paying subscribers who would flag instances of content being illegally copied. On other occasions, it was the title’s journalists who spotted that their work had been lifted, particularly if copyright infringing websites had good SEO or social media reach, although the fact that articles are famously byline-free only made the problem harder to monitor.

A real impact on revenues

Syndication and Licensing Director Joanna Alexandre says cases of infringement typically fall into two camps. On the one hand, there are examples of more isolated pages or articles being copied, whether the perpetrators could either be naïve to copyright law or flouting it flagrantly. On the other hand, The Economist team had also been made aware of whole print issues being brazenly copied in PDF form and made available on platforms including WhatsApp, Telegram, GitHub, and Reddit.

Joanna points out that, irrespective of how it was copied, providing access to The Economist’s valuable intellectual property outside of the terms of its content licence has an impact on the brand as well as profitability. In some cases, fraudsters might charge for access via cryptocurrency, syphoning away sales. In other cases, content might be given away for free, resulting in an ‘opportunity cost’ through lost potential cover sales. “Where people would have purchased the issue, that’s £7.99 directly ‘stolen’ from us,” she says.

Freely available content also leads to the efforts of the subscription team being undermined while presenting an understandable source of frustration for syndication partners, whose investment is based on the content’s inherent exclusivity.

Regaining control of the situation

Prior to engaging with NLA Media Access and employing Text Tracker, The Economist made determined efforts to tackle the issue head on, but Joanna explains that barriers quickly arose. The lack of contact information made communication with infringing sites difficult and time-consuming. The problem also ended up crossing multiple desks, with licensing, subscriptions, and legal departments all required to spend valuable time and effort in concerted attempts to have copied content taken down.

Joanna says this all resulted in energies being diverted away from core tasks such as selling. “Dealing with infringements is not a task that’s typically core to the day-to-day business. It’s not necessarily any one person’s role. At the same time, it’s infringing on everyone’s efforts,” she explains.

Today, this task is entirely outsourced to Text Tracker, which scours the web for copied content. Where it finds evidence of infringement, NLA Media Access then handles the take-down process on the title’s behalf.

As a result, The Economist now has the assurance not only of being able to gauge the scale of this IP-theft ‘iceberg’, but also of knowing that whoever is attempting to pursue monetisation strategies on the back of its content will be tracked and required to cease and desist.

“It’s a difficult problem, but it’s one that much easier to solve with Text Tracker,” concludes Joanna. “It takes that pain away from us and means we’re doing all we can to stay on top things and protect our journalism.”

For more information on Text Tracker, including a chance to see if your editorial content is being illegally copied online, click here or contact NLA Media Access today by emailing copyrightinfringement@nla.co.uk.