The Sun threatens legal action over alleged MailOnline copyright breach

The Sun has accused MailOnline of stealing exclusive content and threatened legal proceedings in a sign of the escalating battle for digital news revenues.

Lawyers at the Sun, still the biggest selling popular newspaper in the UK but with far fewer readers than the MailOnline, sent the letter claiming copyright infringement earlier this week.

The row over the Mail’s alleged misuse of exclusive footage of Adam Johnson, the disgraced footballer in prison for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old fan, and another story about former reality TV star Ferne McCann, comes after Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper group in Australia launched similar legal proceedings two years ago.

At the heart of the dispute is the attempt to preserve exclusive content as much as possible in order to attract readers. Rival news organisations typically pay a syndication fee along with a link when they use exclusive content.

Since dropping its paywall at the end of 2015, the Sun website has doubled its audience year-on-year to 4.5m average daily unique browsers, according to the latest circulation figures. MailOnline, which has never charged for its content online, attracts three times as many users with 15.5m in March, higher than the second placed Guardian at almost 9m.

With digital advertising revenues falling across the board for newspapers last year, the battle for readers has intensified and the News Corp newspapers are furious at what they have privately called “widespread pilfering”.

“This is piracy and the Mail is getting increasingly blatant about it,” said one executive who declined to be named.

The Sun is claiming copyright fees of more than £50,000 for the Mail’s unauthorised use of both stories.

Even ahead of publication, the newspaper issued warnings about rivals using the video of Johnson, taken from inside the prison where he is serving six years, threatening “an injunction, damages or an account of profits, legal costs and interest”.

At the time of publication, the Guardian had asked MailOnline for a comment.

Accusations of online pilfering have proliferated in recent years. The Mail laughed off the accusations from News Corp in Australia two years ago with one insider telling the Guardian: “It is preposterous that anyone within Rupert Murdoch’s News International or News Corp Australian operation should be questioning anybody on journalistic ethics.”