An official finding that free-riding is not a grey area
Chief Ombudsman John Allen has formally censured the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment for sharing National Business Review paywalled journalism with staff who held no paid licence, the NZ Herald reported. Allen found the practice ‘inappropriate’, ‘unreasonable’ and one that ‘appears to be contrary to law’.
It is the first formal Ombudsman opinion of its kind, and it is almost certainly precedent-setting. The Ombudsman has recommended MBIE apologise to NBR, negotiate ‘an appropriate remedy’, and put in place periodic monitoring to make sure the sharing does not resume. Allen also wrote to the minister responsible for MBIE, Nicola Willis, and to the Public Service Commissioner, so nobody at the top can claim they were not told.
NBR co-editors Calida Stuart-Menteath and Hamish McNicol said the opinion ‘sets a precedent for all media organisations which will enable the long-term sustainability of NZ journalism’. That is the point. The paywall is a legal boundary, not a suggestion.
MBIE is not the only one in the gun
The censure will not be the last. NBR is awaiting final Ombudsman opinions on alleged similar conduct at three further agencies: Inland Revenue, Internal Affairs and the Financial Markets Authority. MBIE simply landed first.
The IRD case, which came to a head in December 2025, is the one that shows what this actually costs. As RNZ reported, between March 2024 and November 2025 IRD shared 22 different NBR articles with staff as standalone Word documents, seven of them distributed to a 600-person email list. The sharing began after IRD dropped a 220-user group subscription in March 2024 and replaced it with a single subscription for one media team member.
The maths that sank IRD’s defence
Here is where the numbers get uncomfortable. A legitimate NBR group subscription for 600 staff over the four-month breach period would have cost an estimated $36,000 plus GST. IRD offered $12,500 including GST, arguing that only 18 to 130 people actually read each article, so damages should reflect readership rather than licence cost.
NBR rejected that framing outright, and publisher Todd Scott banned IRD from future subscriptions once the offer expired without agreement. IRD apologised and acknowledged the breach, but its position, per RNZ, was that it had ‘acknowledged the error in understanding the extent of the licence.’ Treating copyright infringement as a procurement misunderstanding did not wash. You do not get to copy an article to 600 people and then bill the copyright holder based on how many bothered to open it.
Why the private sector should pay attention
The conduct at the centre of these cases is not exotic. It is the everyday forwarding of a paywalled article: pasted into an email, dropped into a Slack channel, copied into a Word document and sent round the team. It happens in almost every large organisation in the country.
The difference is jurisdiction. The Ombudsman only oversees public sector administrative conduct, which is why NBR routed these complaints through that channel. Private companies get no such buffer. They face direct claims under the Copyright Act 1994, and the legal exposure is, if anything, more immediate. There is no Ombudsman process to soften the landing, just a licensor with a grievance and a lawyer.
For compliance and procurement teams the implication is blunt. If your organisation subscribes to a commercial news service, the licence terms govern how that content can be shared. A single-user subscription does not cover a floor of analysts. The cost of getting it wrong is a settlement demand, a possible ban from the service, and the reputational hit of being named for it.
The wider bet on NZ journalism
NBR’s campaign is about more than clawing back licence revenue from specific breaches. It is about establishing that commercial journalism has enforceable value. New Zealand’s media sector has contracted sharply, and subscription income is one of the few business models still standing. Bulk internal sharing lets many readers free-ride on a single licence, which quietly guts the model.
The Ombudsman’s finding that the practice ‘appears to be contrary to law’ is the clearest official statement yet that this is not a grey area. For a government that lectures business on rules and compliance, being the first agency censured for not paying for what it uses is a poor look. The remaining three opinions will tell us whether MBIE was an outlier or the norm. The smart money says the norm.