Cision AB has reached a financial settlement with Dow Jones after the U.S. publisher threatened the PR services company in March over alleged infringement of copyright.
The Sweden-based PR services company said today that it reached a confidential settlement restricting Cision from redistributing original content from Dow Jones, which owns its own monitoring service, Factiva.
Peter Granat, CEO for Cision North America, said Cision's monitoring service will no longer provide content published by Dow Jones, which includes its newswires, newsletters, the Wall Street Journal and Barron's, among others. Cision subscribers will be directed to DJ to obtain such content.
Granat said Cision saw protracted negotiations as wasteful and expressed a desire to move forward and end litigation.
Dow Jones said Cision AB and its U.S. unit have paid a "significant sum" the settle a claim of "unauthorized reproduction, distribution and other misuse" of DJ content.
Mark H. Jackson, general counsel for DJ, said in a statement, "This settlement is another reminder that only paying customers enjoy full access to Dow Jones' highly valuable journalism, and anyone who free rides on our content will face serious financial repercussions."
Cision said its second quarter results will be affected by the deal, but did not disclose the settlement amount other than to note earnings previously forecast for around 35M SEK (about $5M) will instead be 10M SEK ($1.4M) loss.
Cision CEO Hans Gieskes said in March that the damages claim from a then-unnamed publisher would likely impact earnings, but he said it was impossible to quantify at the time.
Second quarter earnings will be released July 18.
Cision has brought in Dawn Conway, an attorney and former VP of global licensing for Lexis Nexis, to be senior VP of global content licensing.
Cision said she is responsible for acquiring and retaining all licensed content in support of its global businesses, including its news monitoring and media database services.
"This will entail establishing new partnerships and revenue models with publishers of all types of content everywhere, to not only support Cision but move the media monitoring industry into a new mode that protects the rights of publishers across all media channels while enabling the kind of distribution and sharing that our customers require to do their jobs," she said in a Q&A from the company.