When I came back from Shanghai, I was informed that SPH Marketing Division has sent us a letter informing us that we “have reproduced on your website, certain articles owned by Singapore Press Holdings Ltd (SPH)”, and thus would like us to pay $535.00 (inc GST) in license fees per article per year, as well as $214.00 (inc GST) being reimbursement to us for investigation fee.
Failing to do so will result in a law suit against The Dating Loft. Established in 2006, The Dating Loft has it’s fair share of mention in the local press and yes we have benefitted from the press coverage. However, we are still a small company with only about 5 full time staff. Asking us to pay $535 per article per year and we have about 20 or so articles on our website that are produced by the media giant SPH (well, it’s practically a monopoly publishing everything from Straits Times, Sunday Times, Business Times, The New Paper and that’s not counting the Chinese and Malay papers and the magazines).
That works out to about $10,000 per year in license fees for the 20 or so articles on our website. Yes, SPH owns the right to these articles, they pay their writers to write these articles and their photographers have taken the pictures. But hey what about our time and resources spent answering your email interviews and phone queries and photo sessions? Without us providing the content, would the articles be produced (and rake in the advertising dollars from your advertisers?)
All I can say, we are a tiny company. $10,000 is probably a drop in the bucket for a media mammoth such as SPH, but for us, it can be one whole year’s marketing revenue. What can we do in face of such force? Well, we have to take down the articles online, which we have contributed to.