The online PR & communications world is all a flutter this morning following the news that Times Online has blocked media monitoring service Meltwater from crawling its site.

Norweigan company Meltwater has been at the heart of a dispute with several UK newspapers of late, after refusing to pay for the cuttings they source, then charging agencies and brands alike to keep the cuttings on file.

As reported by Paid Content, the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) – which is owned by eight leading UK national news publishers – introduced two new licenses in January requiring that first, monitoring companies pay between £5,000 and £10,000 per year to crawl online papers and that their clients pay £58 a year to receive that intelligence.

However, does it make any real difference to the hundreds of agencies working in the online space? Is this – as it’s being positioned by Meltwater – a matter of having the right to freedom of speech? Or just a commercial dispute gone mainstream?

Matt Muir, digital consultant at Hill & Knowlton is less than convinced. “I am slightly puzzled by the Paid Content article’s statement that “thousands of Meltwater customers around the world won’t get to inform clients when their company is mentioned in The Times.” Er, free search? Google? Bing? All the other search engines that are still allowed to crawl The Times? Those paying for day-to-day monitoring of online news (monitoring of social media and during a crisis are both different, I concede) are missing a trick somewhere.”

Stephen Waddington, managing director at Speed, has written at length about this topic and agrees that this issue is just a small part of a much broader problem. “It’s odd that The Times is taking this direct action against Meltwater and News Now, yet News International is not exercising the NLA’s new web clipping license despite being an NLA member. It shows the ongoing turmoil in the publishing industry as it attempts to shift from print to online.”

Indeed, as Waddington also told us, attitudes are bound to change over the next 18 months as newspaper publishers raise paywalls in front of their sites – and news articles are replaced by summaries in Google News searches. “The move will inevitably hurt Meltwater. Clients rely on it to provide a comprehensive service and a fragmented monitoring service isn’t helpful if you are charged with managing the reputation of a business.”

Therefore, instead of this being a game-changing industry move, it’s simply a publisher trying to protect its IP and a business using the opportunity to get some press out of it.