Meltwater made a final bid to counter the NLA’s licensing scheme at the
Copyright Tribunal,165 which helps parties decide “the terms and conditions of
licences offered by . . . collective licensing bodies . . . .”166 The news
aggregator fought against requiring its clients to pay for receiving a search
result after clicking on the provided link, arguing that these license fees
significantly increase operational costs to many UK businesses in the strained
economy.167 Furthermore, the aggregator disagreed with the Meltwater opinion
because its “millions of professionals will unwittingly infringe copyright
legislation on a daily basis by simply browsing the web.”168 The Copyright
Tribunal provided an online licensing regime to ensure stability for both
publishers and end-users.169 The Tribunal, however, cut the NLA’s proposed
license fees because they found them to be too high.170 While Meltwater paints
this ruling as a broad decision that affects all consumers,171 the ruling only
affects commercial operators. Although licenses are not required of free
aggregators, such as Google News,172 litigation is still a possibility.173