The Irish Times set out its position on web links last Friday in the wake of criticism of the stance on copyright taken, and since clarified, by industry group National Newspapers of Ireland.

While commercial reproduction or republication of the newspaper’s content – including automated “scraping”, summarisation and aggregation – is subject to the licensing requirements overseen by the NNI’s subsidiary Newspaper Licensing Ireland, The Irish Times supports “linking without any republication or reproduction”, it stated.

This type of linking is indeed promoted and encouraged on each article on irishtimes.com.

In other words, as long as the link returns the reader to an irishtimes.comURL, where eyeballs and therefore the value of the content to advertisers can be measured, then everything's fine and everyone's a winner.

The Irish Times is changing a copyright statement on its website that currently says links are not permitted other than to the home page, except with prior written consent.

“We are reviewing the wording of our copyright statement and will make a change when we redesign the website in February,” says Hugh Linehan, online editor . “If we can do it earlier we will.”