Paywalled business articles were sent to unlicensed staff at a New Zealand government agency on 8,221 occasions between 2021 and 2025, in what the National Business Review's publisher now calls the "largest copyright infringement" case it has investigated, the NZ Herald reported in its Media Insider column.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, which has previously apologised for the "unauthorised sharing" of NBR content, offered a confidential settlement last month of almost $70,000, based on 1,371 articles "shared to MBIE recipients who did not have a current NBR subscription".
"We acknowledge the past sharing of NBR content will have impacted you, and propose to address this with a payment of $68,481.45," MBIE's Paul Stocks said in a letter dated 30 September to the publisher. "We have calculated this payment on a per-article basis at your standard monthly subscription rate of $49.95."
A subsequent Official Information Act response to the NBR last week outlined a different measurement and a much larger number. The ministry sent a breakdown of the number of unique staff without an NBR subscription who were sent one or more articles each month between mid-2021 and the end of 2025.
Across that four-and-a-half-year period, MBIE recorded 8,221 instances of unlicensed staff receiving at least one NBR article. In February 2024, for example, 315 unlicensed MBIE staff were sent one or more articles.
"MBIE's own disclosure records 8221 unlicensed recipient-months: each person counted in each month they received our content without the required subscription," the NBR co-owner and publisher, Todd Scott, said in a post on LinkedIn on Saturday. "At our individual monthly rate, that represents $410,638.95 in access value, including GST. That is our calculation, not a court award."
With around 6,000 staff, MBIE is one of New Zealand's biggest public sector agencies. It supports New Zealand businesses, jobs, innovation and economic growth.
In July, the Chief Ombudsman described MBIE's sharing of paywalled business journalism as "inappropriate", "unreasonable" and appearing "to be contrary to law".
The publisher's year-long campaign to ensure public and private organisations abide by its paywall subscription rules and copyright law has reached almost two dozen settlements with government agencies and companies, resulting in payments for damages of more than $200,000 as well as legal costs.
The NBR says most of the alleged breaches of copyright have been through entities "sharing small numbers of subscriptions widely among their staff or by using subscriptions to share copied versions of articles to non-subscribers". Its terms and conditions specify that a subscription cannot be shared with others and that to do so is a breach of copyright.
What is striking in all this is that the two sides agree on the price. A month of the NBR costs $49.95, and $49.95 is the figure in both calculations. They disagree only about what there are 1,371 or 8,221 of.
The ministry multiplied $49.95 by articles. The publisher multiplied $49.95 by people-months. Each arrives at a total stated to the cent, $68,481.45 and $410,638.95, and the six-fold gap between them is not a dispute about money. It is a dispute about nouns.
The method is indifferent to its unit, which is what makes it so adaptable. At $49.95 an article, a month's subscription is worth one article, which is generous to the publisher in a quiet news week and ruinous in a busy one. At $49.95 a recipient-month, a staff member who was sent one headline in February 2024 is worth exactly as much as one who was sent everything.
Other countable things are available. There were 315 people in a single month, 54 months in the period and around 6,000 staff in the ministry, as well as an unknown number of forwarded emails, paragraphs and recipients of recipients. Each of them multiplies by $49.95 and yields a figure accurate to the cent.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has declined to reconcile the two valuations and has instead applied the agreed rate to the only unit both parties accept, which is the month.
Fifty-four months at $49.95 is $2,697.30.