Welcome to the Media Copyright Agency.

We work on behalf of New Zealand’s leading news and magazine publishers, providing copyright licenses to businesses and other organisations.

Contact us today to find out if you need a licence.

We represent around 40 publishers covering 200 publications including their digital content.

We provide a one-stop-shop to get a single copyright licence that covers all the publications we represent, and we make it easy for them and you by offering a single licence that gives you access to works from all of the publications you select.

With our licence you can get on with what you do best, without worrying if you’re covered.

Revenue from your licence fees is distributed back to publishers in the form of royalty payments so they can continue to invest in producing quality, fact-checked journalism.

Apply Online

All businesses and organisations need a licence if they want to copy, store, or distribute the content produced by the publishers we represent.

Don’t worry, we’ve made it super simple for you to apply for the right kind of licence for your organisation. Click the button and follow the prompts to get started.

Publishers we represent

Adrenalin Publishing Ltd  |  Advocate Communications Ltd  |  Agri Media Ltd  |  AgriHQ Limited  |  Are Media  |  Consumer |  Contrafed  |  CountryWide Media  |  Hex Works Ltd t/a The Spinoff  |  Intermedia  |  JDJL LIMITED  |  Kowhai Media  |  Long Haul Publications  |  LT Publishing  |  Marine Media Limited  |  Michael deHamel  |  Newsroom  |  NZ Fishing Media  |  NZAA  |  Radio New Zealand  |  Review Publishing Co. Ltd |  River City Press  |  Slick & Sassy Media Ltd  |  Soar Communication Group |  The Health Media  |  The T2 Agency Ltd / Trends  |  Twenty Seven Publishers  |  VIP Publications  |  Wellington Suburban Newspapers (WSN)

About Us

Who We Are

The Media Copyright Agency was established on the 1st January 2003. We represent around 40 publishers covering 200 publications including their digital content.

What We Do

We work on behalf of New Zealand’s leading news and magazine publishers, providing licenses to organisations who copy, store and distribute newspaper, magazine and news website content so that they can do so legally.

By obtaining a licence from the MCA, organisations can protect themselves form non-compliance risks and gain the right to copy articles from most major New Zealand news media publications.

Meet the Team

Brook and Chris are the key contacts at the Media Copyright Agency and are based in the Textile Centre in Parnell, Auckland.  Please don’t hesitate to contact Chris directly regarding any licensing queries, or Brook for anything else, using our contact us form.

Chris Maxwell, Licensing Manager and Brook Cameron, General Manager

What is copyright and why are licences needed?

  • Copyright is a statutory property right that applies automatically in New Zealand when a ‘work’ is created. Amongst other things, a work can be a physical or digital article, piece of text, or image, a video, or a recording.
  • The © symbol only acts as a reminder. Even when the © is not displayed, copyright still applies.
  • All of the publications we represent are protected by copyright, whether they are print (hard copy) publications or online publications.
  • Copyright in a work is infringed when someone who is not the owner does something that is a “restricted act” without permission (i.e., a licence) from the copyright owner.
  • Restricted acts include copying (which can include uploading, downloading, saving electronically, forwarding electronically, printing, etc.), adapting, or circulating a work or a substantial part of it. Many restricted acts are activities that most organisations and businesses do routinely as part of day-to-day business practice. Having a licence that covers these activities means that businesses can get on with their day-to-day activity without the risk of infringing copyright.
  • Copyright licensing is also an important source of revenue for publishers, complementing their sales revenues and helping them to continue to provide quality journalism.

Our Licences

Apply for a licence

All businesses and organisations need a licence if they want to copy, store, or distribute the content produced by the publishers we represent, including if they use a Media Monitoring Organisation.

Apply for a licence
Media Monitoring Organisations

There are a number of media monitoring agencies who are licenced to use our publications in their media monitoring service.
Currently these are Isentia, Streem, Meltwater and, from 1st June 2025 Fuseworks/Truescope.

Please get in touch with us about a licence if you are using a media monitoring service, to make sure you are covered for your own copying and use of the media monitoring material you receive. You may have already received this information (for businesses operating in New Zealand or New Zealand and overseas) or this information (for businesses operating outside New Zealand) from your MMO about this.

All our licensed media monitoring organisations are required to provide us with information about their clients and the type of service they provide. We use this information to run our licensing scheme, including helping to ensure that appropriate licences are in place, to calculate fees, and to calculate royalties that are due to our publishers.

Publishers

The MCA’s role is to ensure that publishers’ rights are respected and the value of their work is appropriately recognised and remunerated.

The MCA currently represents around 40 publishers covering 200 publications including their digital content too.

If you would like the MCA to represent your content, please contact us to discuss.

Why do I need an End User Licence? (and other FAQs)

All of the publications we represent are protected by copyright, whether they are print (hard copy) publications or online publications. These publications contain various copyright works, such as articles, editorials, etc.

Copyright in a work is infringed when someone who is not the owner does something that is a “restricted act” without permission from the copyright owner. A licence is a way of giving that permission.

Restricted acts include copying (which can include uploading, downloading, saving electronically, forwarding electronically, printing, etc.), adapting, or circulating a work or a substantial part of it. Many restricted acts are activities that most organisations and businesses do routinely as part of day-to-day business practice. Having a licence that covers these activities means that businesses can get on with their day-to-day activity lawfully.

Copyright licensing is also an important source of revenue for publishers, complementing their sales revenues and helping them to continue to provide quality journalism.

Our End User Licence Agreement covers the sort of copying that most businesses do on a day-to-day basis. It is also designed to supplement your subscription agreement with the publisher and your media monitoring contract if you have either or both of these.

Here are some examples of activities that usually require a licence and can be covered by our End-User Licence:

  • Saving or uploading copies of articles to an intranet or other archive.
  • Making copies, for example, printing, scanning, or creating PDFs, “snips”, screen-shots, or other digital copies.
  • Distributing (via hard copy, email, social media, uploading to a website, or otherwise) any of the following:
    • printed, digital, or scanned copies; and
    • hyperlinks that have been edited to incorporate a substantial part of the content (e.g., by adding text copied from an article).

For clients of our licensed media monitoring organisations; our End-User Licence also allows you to save, download, copy or store publisher content in media monitoring reports whether that is sent to you in emails or portals containing hyperlinks, headlines, snippets of publisher content.

There are other activities that may also amount to copying and need a licence. It is your responsibility to assess your business’s activity and make sure you have an appropriate licence if needed.

Our End User Licence is customisable, so that you can select the publications you want. You can also add extra activities to the basic licence. Please see our pricing or contact us for further information.

Media Monitoring Organisations (MMOs) are licenced by the MCA to use our publishers’ content to create MMO materials for clients and send those materials to clients. Importantly, however, they don’t have permission to grant any copying licence to their clients who are carrying on business in New Zealand. These clients need to obtain their own licence for any copying they undertake.

In practice, most businesses with an MMO contract will be copying the publisher content in their MMSO reports in some way and so will need a licence for multiple publications to enable them to do that copying without infringing copyright.  Each of our publishers has appointed us to provide licences on their behalf for this purpose. This is what our End User Licence does – it gives the right to copy from all the publications from our list that you choose.

We have a different licensing structure for MMSO clients who are operating only outside New Zealand, with a different fee structure.

Our End User Licence is designed to work with corporate subscriptions.

Publishers decide what activities they allow under their corporate subscription terms, but most allow only very limited copying. For example, they may allow you to access and read (view) the content on their website for business purposes but prohibit any other copying. This is where our End-User Licence comes in – it allows a wide range of copying activity.

Also, your corporate subscription will likely only relate to one publication or one publisher.  An End User Licence is customisable and can cover a range of other publications that people in your business have access to. 

Our End-User Licence allows you to copy the website content that is covered by your licence, provide it is only for internal business purposes. (Some restrictions apply  – please see “What can’t I do under the End-User Licence.”)

Our basic licence allows copying of articles for your business’s internal use. However, there are some things that our End-User Licence doesn’t allow you to do with publisher content: Some examples are:

  • use for advertising or publicity;
  • use for external business purposes, such as where you are selling copies or adaptations of content;
  • use in a way that could be substitute for the relevant publication(s);
  • use to train artificial intelligence;
  • copying audio or video content and certain other content;
  • (unless you have an appropriate extension) sending copies to a person outside your business.

Please see the licence terms for details of all exclusions and restrictions.

Contact us

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Level 4, Textile Lofts
1 Kenwyn Street
Parnell, Auckland 1052
New Zealand

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