For four years, staff at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment treated National Business Review’s paywalled journalism like the office biscuit tin. Now NBR has put a number on it. An Official Information Act response from MBIE shows paywalled NBR articles were sent to unlicensed staff on 8221 occasions between 2021 and 2025, and NBR values that access at $410,638.95 including GST.
That figure turns media copyright from an abstract principle into something far more familiar to a business owner, a measurable compliance cost with a methodology attached.
Two ways to count the same conduct
The dispute now turns on arithmetic. On 30 September, MBIE offered NBR $68,481.45, according to a letter from MBIE’s Paul Stocks. That offer counted 1371 articles shared with recipients who lacked a current subscription, priced at $49.95 each.
NBR counts differently. MBIE’s own disclosure describes the 8221 figure as “unlicensed recipient-months: each person counted in each month they received our content without the required subscription”, NBR co-owner Todd Scott wrote on LinkedIn. Multiply by NBR’s individual monthly subscription rate and you get the $410,000 figure, nearly six times MBIE’s offer. Scott is careful to say “that is our calculation, not a court award”, the Herald reports.
The scale is not trivial. In February 2024 alone, 315 unlicensed MBIE staff received one or more NBR articles. That is not a few policy analysts swapping links. That is a parallel distribution network running inside a 6000-person agency.
Anyone who has sat through a software vendor’s licence audit will recognise the move. Count discrete uses and the exposure looks manageable. Count unlicensed seats over time and it balloons. Vendors choose the metric that suits them, and once they hold the usage data, the customer is negotiating from behind.
The Ombudsman already called it
MBIE cannot easily argue this is a misunderstanding. In July, Chief Ombudsman John Allen found the sharing was “inappropriate”, “systemic” and “appears to be contrary to law”. He said the level of sharing “indicates systemic practice that appears to have harmed NBR’s commercial position”.
Allen wrote to Nicola Willis as the responsible minister and to the Public Service Commissioner, and recommended MBIE apologise, report on the extent of sharing, introduce periodic monitoring and engage with NBR on a remedy. Stocks, MBIE’s deputy secretary corporate and digital shared services, responded that MBIE “takes its obligations in relation to copyright, licensing agreements and the management of third-party content seriously”. It has since bought more licences, updated guidance and tightened subscription management.
All sensible. All after the fact. The remediation followed a formal finding of apparent illegality, not an internal audit. For the agency whose job is helping businesses navigate regulation and compliance, that is an awkward look.
MBIE was not alone
The habit ran across the public service. By July, departments had admitted to at least 230 inappropriately shared articles: MBIE at least 149, Inland Revenue at least 43, Internal Affairs at least 23 and the Serious Fraud Office at least 15.
NBR’s owners, Todd and Jackie Scott, have been enforcing their terms since around October 2025, against companies as well as agencies. By September, NBR had settled with the FMA, SFO and DIA, was pursuing Inland Revenue for $50,000, and had already extracted more than $200,000 from 19 private companies. The Herald now counts almost two dozen settlements. NBR has also shut Inland Revenue out of subscriptions entirely, a reminder that a vendor can withdraw the product as well as send the bill.
Scott has framed the campaign as a precedent NZME, Stuff, Are Media, ODT and Newsroom could use against agencies. If they do, the public service’s aggregate exposure gets considerably larger, and taxpayers foot the bill for a governance failure that cost nothing to prevent.
What this means for your subscriptions
Strip out the media-versus-government framing and this is a plain story about controls. Many businesses hold one or two seats on Bloomberg, a trade journal, a research database or a per-seat software tool, then let content leak through email chains and shared drives. It feels victimless. It is not, once the vendor has logs, a lawyer and a reason to use them.
The fixes are dull. Know who holds licences. Ban forwarding of paywalled content to non-subscribers in writing. Buy a site licence if demand justifies it, which is usually cheaper than a retrospective claim. Check periodically, because the vendor eventually will.
The next milestone is whether MBIE and NBR settle somewhere between $68,000 and $410,000 or let a court decide which counting method is right. Either outcome will set a reference price for informal sharing. Smart businesses will audit their own subscriptions before someone else does it for them.
Sources
- NZ Herald: Media Insider – NBR v MBIE, stakes escalate in copyright case; paywalled articles sent to unlicensed staff in 8221 instances (2026-10-25)
- NZ Herald: Media Insider – Chief Ombudsman censures MBIE over staff sharing of NBR paywalled journalism (2026-07-12)
- RNZ: National Business Review bans Inland Revenue after alleged copyright breach
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