Last week, I attended the Future of Content debate, held by Meltwater and the PRCA. The event preceded Meltwater/PRCA’s appeal tomorrow against last year’s legal ruling, which effectively requires businesses circulating inbound links to obtain a licence from the UK’s Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA). Clearly, the issue has some major implications for the media industry, and Meltwater made the smart move of inviting the NLA’s David Pugh to sit on the panel, alongside Meltwater CEO Jorn Lyssegen, the PRCA’s Francis Ingham, Edelman’s Richard Sambrook and some figures from the worlds of journalism and academia. As Stephen Waddington pointed out in his excellent summary of the evening, the debate returned repeatedly to the theme that digital technology is rapidly outpacing current legal standards. How else to explain a regime that criminalises businesses for circulating links? It is worth checking out the various video links of the evening, which you can find here. The event was titled 'The Future of Content', yet I couldn't help but feel that the debate veered rather more into the past than many of its panelists would have liked; best illustrated by discussion of the apparently inescapable virtues of 'traditional' media. Personally, I found the most interesting segment to be the start, when Sambrook delivered an impressive summary of the ways in which digital technology are dramatically altering existing media business models. It is definitely worth watching:

FoC Debate - Keynote Speech from Meltwater Group on Vimeo.