Media liability insurance. For the claims that start with what you published, not what you advised.

Production companies, agencies, publishers, event producers and creators carry risks that a professional indemnity policy was never written to answer.

Media liability insurance combines cover for the content you publish with professional indemnity, public liability and cyber, in one policy.

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If you advise clients and publish nothing, that is a different policy, professional indemnity, not this one. See professional indemnity insurance. If you sell technology or IT services rather than content, start on IT liability insurance.

What is media liability insurance, and how is it different from professional indemnity?

Quick answerMedia liability insurance is a packaged policy for businesses that create and publish content. Where a professional indemnity policy is one insuring clause covering claims about your advice or your services, a media package can run a dozen or more separate insuring clauses in one contract: content claims, professional indemnity, public liability and cyber among them. You buy the clauses you need, and your schedule, not the wording, decides which ones you have.

Start with what does not change. A media package still contains professional indemnity, so it still answers the claim a professional indemnity policy answers: a client saying your work caused them a financial loss. How that cover behaves, why the date it reaches back to matters, what run-off is and what happens if you do not report a problem before your policy expires are all set out on our professional indemnity insurance page, and this page does not repeat any of it.

What changes is the shape of the contract. An insuring clause is the part of a policy that says "we will pay for this". A standard professional indemnity wording has one of them, covering your civil liability, with a handful of extensions bolted on around the edges to reach things the main clause does not. The media wordings we place work the other way round: a dozen or more separate insuring clauses, each with its own trigger, sitting under one shared set of definitions, exclusions and conditions. Content claims, professional indemnity, public liability, cyber, and several more besides.

Which means the wording is a menu and your schedule is your policy. Those clauses are bought individually. The wording sets out everything that can be purchased under that contract, and the schedule records what you actually purchased. Two businesses can hold a policy with the same name on the front and own genuinely different documents. So when anyone tells you a media policy "includes" property cover, or directors cover, or business interruption, the honest answer is that it can, and yours does only if it is written on your schedule. This is the single most useful habit to build with a packaged product: read the schedule, not the brochure.

And the description of your business does real work. On these wordings, content is insured where it was created or put out in the course of the business activities recorded on your schedule. That is the same tether a professional indemnity policy uses, and it bites the same way. A production company that quietly becomes a talent agency, or an agency that starts reselling software, has changed the business the policy was written for. Tell your broker when the work changes, not at renewal.

A technology or IT business asking this same question about its own product class should start on IT liability insurance, which answers how that cover differs from professional indemnity. This page does not.

What a media package covers that a standard professional indemnity policy does not

Quick answerFour things, mainly. A written demand to retract or correct something can itself count as a claim, so the policy engages from the first letter. The policy can cover a third party you agreed in writing to protect, which broadcast, venue and platform contracts routinely demand. Injury and damage at a shoot or an event can be covered. And intellectual property, defamation and privacy are primary cover rather than an extension.

A letter demanding a retraction can be the claim itself. This is the sharpest difference between the two product classes and almost nobody knows it. On the media wordings we place, a written request for a retraction or a correction is inside the definition of a claim, so the policy can be notified and can engage from the moment that letter lands. On many standard professional indemnity wordings, a claim means a proceeding or a demand for monetary compensation, so a letter asking you to take something down is not yet a claim at all. The business then funds the earliest and most defensible stage of the dispute out of its own pocket, which is usually the stage where it is least expensive to end. The comparison runs both ways, and here is the other direction: those professional indemnity definitions typically catch a demand made verbally, while the media definition is written demands only. Whichever policy you hold, the safe move is the same. Tell your broker the day the letter arrives.

Contracts that make you cover somebody else. Broadcast agreements, venue hire, brand endorsement deals and platform terms routinely require you to extend your insurance to the other party, and to do it ahead of their own insurance. The media wordings we place carry a condition that does this: the indemnity extends to a party you have agreed in writing to indemnify, and can respond ahead of that party's own cover where the contract says it must. A standard professional indemnity wording generally has no mechanism for it, and commonly excludes liability you have taken on under a contract in the first place. That is a problem you find out about at signing, not at claim time, which is the good news. Send us the insurance clause before you sign it.

Injury and damage where the work physically happens. A shoot, a live event, a hired studio or location. Someone trips over a cable, a light stand goes through a wall, a hired venue comes back damaged, merchandise you produced hurts somebody. A media package can carry public and products liability for exactly that, and it carves damage to premises you are renting back out of the usual exclusion for property in your care. A standard professional indemnity wording is not built for injury or property damage and will not usually respond to it. Generic questions about this cover on its own are answered on our public liability insurance page.

Content claims as primary cover, not as an extension. Intellectual property infringement, passing off, plagiarism, and misuse of somebody's concept or format sit in these wordings as primary cover, alongside defamation, injurious falsehood (claims that you damaged another business by publishing something false about it), product disparagement, invasion of privacy, and commercial use of a person's name or likeness. So does failing to credit an author, and revealing a confidential source. On a standard professional indemnity wording, intellectual property is usually excluded and then partly returned by extension, and defamation is reached by extension with a proviso that you did not intend to defame. Two catches matter before you rely on any of it. Patent infringement is commonly excluded from media wordings with no way back in. And a claim that you ran past a licence is normally pleaded as royalties owed to the licensor, which lands inside the exclusion for licence and royalty payments, with cover returning only where you acted in good faith and did not know you were in breach. Good faith is a condition of recovery there, not a formality.

Cyber, both directions, inside the same contract. Where those clauses are purchased, a media package reaches incident response, notification and forensics after a breach, rebuilding data, liability to other people for a privacy or network security failure, funds transferred out by fraud including social engineering, and extortion. There is a business interruption limb that can trigger on a cyber event, a system failure or an operator error, which is wider than most people assume. This is structure, not a substitute for reading a specialist wording: if cyber is your main exposure rather than one of several, start on our cyber insurance page.

Two smaller ones that matter more than they sound. Vicarious liability for the contractors who deliver your work is carried as standard in these wordings, which counts in an industry that runs on freelancers, though standard professional indemnity wordings commonly reach it by extension too. And there is a fee clause: where a client is threatening a claim, the policy can pay the fees they are withholding to head the problem off, but only once that client confirms in writing that they will not sue, and the money comes back net of your profit, your mark-up and tax. Knowing that gate exists before you start negotiating is the whole point of knowing the clause is there.

Beyond those, these wordings can extend to commercial property, business interruption, directors and officers cover, legal expenses, public relations help and the cost of attending court. Available is not the same as bought: each is a separate purchase and your schedule decides. Those covers have their own homes here, at commercial property insurance, business interruption insurance and management liability insurance.

Where a media package is narrower than a professional indemnity policy

Quick answerA media package is not a bigger professional indemnity policy. It trades one broad grant for many specific ones, and some of what a standard professional indemnity wording covers gets narrowed on the way. Advertising claims, audience tracking, drones and covert recording are the ones to check before you rely on it, and one claim covered by two clauses usually pays one limit rather than both.

Every honest description of this product has two halves, and this is the half that gets left out of brochures. Moving from a professional indemnity policy to a media package is a trade: you go from one broad grant with extensions around it to a dozen or more specific grants covering content, physical work and data. Specific grants are stronger where they hit and quieter where they do not, and there are places where the media wording gives ground that a professional indemnity wording holds.

Claims about the advertising itself. Some media wordings exclude civil liability for misleading or deceptive advertising, which is precisely the claim an agency's own deliverable can generate, while some professional indemnity and technology wordings affirmatively cover unintentional breaches of consumer law. That word "unintentional" is doing real work and should never be dropped. Which side your wording falls on is a reading job rather than a product question, and for an agency it is the first exclusion we read.

Data you collected without asking. These wordings exclude claims arising from a failure to get consent before collecting, storing or processing someone's personal information, and that expressly reaches search history and browsing habits, with nothing carved back. If your business does audience tracking, pixel-based measurement or anything adtech shaped, that is not a footnote, it is the question to put to the wording before you buy it.

Two production exclusions to settle before the shoot, not after. Anything involving an aircraft, a drone or a hovercraft falls outside the general liability side of these wordings entirely, so aerial filming needs its own answer and it is not this policy. And unlawful surveillance is excluded: eavesdropping, wiretapping, and unauthorised audio or video recording made by you or for you. That reaches hidden-camera work, doorstep journalism and covert documentary capture, which for some production businesses is the actual job.

What a limit actually pays when two clauses answer the same claim. A packaged policy invites a reasonable assumption that is usually wrong: that if an incident touches two sections, you have both limits. On these wordings, where one claim is covered under more than one section you generally get the single highest applicable limit, not the sum of them, and claims flowing from one original cause are treated as one claim. This is a market convention rather than one insurer being difficult, and a competing technology package runs its own version of the same rule. It is worth understanding, because the number on the front of a policy schedule is not by itself an answer to "how much cover do we have".

Who needs media liability insurance?

Quick answerBusinesses whose revenue comes from making or distributing content, whatever the job title on the door. Production and filming companies, event producers, publishers, advertising and digital agencies, creators and influencers, and businesses that license their name, format or work. The test is not your industry code. It is whether a dispute about your content, your contracts or your production work would land on you.

There is a cleaner way to work out whether this product class fits, and it is not the list. It is five exposure shapes, and the more of them you carry, the more a packaged media structure is worth looking at. Intellectual property and reputation risk, because you publish. Client contracts that go beyond a scope of works, including licence and endorsement deals. Physical work, because filming, production and events happen in real rooms with real people in them. Contractors delivering your work under your name. And holding other people's sensitive data. Carry one of those and a standard professional indemnity policy may well still be the right home. Carry three or four and it usually is not.

The awkward middle, said plainly. Digital marketing agencies, web designers and search agencies sit between two entirely different product architectures. One is content-led, weighted towards intellectual property, defamation and privacy, which is the media package described on this page. The other is technology-led, weighted towards depth of cyber cover, and some insurers only offer their technology package to businesses that operate in the technology sector at all. The label on the front of the document tells you almost nothing about which one suits you. The wording decides, and the honest answer for a business in that middle is that both should be read before either is bought. If your business is closer to the technology side, the package described there is on our technology insurance page, and the standard wording an IT business buys because a client contract asks for a certificate is on IT liability insurance.

What actually drives this purchase. Not a regulator. Contracts. Broadcast agreements, venue hire, brand deals and platform terms that name the cover you have to hold before you can start work, and clients who ask for a certificate before they sign. That is why this cover tends to arrive on a business's agenda the week a big contract does, and why the useful time to look at it is before the contract, when the insurance clause is still negotiable.

If you advise clients and publish nothing, professional indemnity insurance is the product and this page is not for you. If your worry is your own systems going down or your own data being stolen rather than what you put out into the world, that is cyber insurance.

Common questions

Media Liability Insurance Australia: your questions answered

What is media liability insurance?

Media liability insurance is a packaged policy for businesses that create, publish or distribute content. It combines cover for content claims, such as intellectual property infringement, defamation and invasion of privacy, with professional indemnity, public liability and cyber cover under a single contract. Those parts are bought individually, so the wording sets out everything that can be included and the schedule records what a particular business actually holds, which is why two policies with the same name can be very different documents.

How is media liability insurance different from professional indemnity insurance?

A standard professional indemnity policy is built around a single insuring clause covering claims that your advice or your services caused someone a financial loss, with extensions added around it. A media package can instead run a dozen or more separate insuring clauses in one contract, so it can also answer a written demand to retract something you published, a contract requiring you to cover a broadcaster or a venue, an injury on a shoot, and a cyber incident. It is not simply a larger policy: some things a professional indemnity wording covers, a media wording narrows, so comparing them properly means reading both documents. The standard product is covered on professional indemnity insurance; a technology or IT business asking the same question starts on IT liability insurance.

We have been sent a letter demanding a retraction or a takedown. Is that an insurance claim?

It depends which product class the policy belongs to, and the difference is stark. On the media wordings we place, a written request for a retraction or a correction is itself inside the definition of a claim, so the policy can be notified and can engage from the first letter. On many standard professional indemnity wordings a claim means a proceeding or a demand for money, so a takedown letter is not yet a claim and the business funds the earliest stage of the dispute itself, which is usually the stage where it is least expensive to end. Either way the practical answer is the same: tell your broker the day the letter arrives.

A contract says we must add our client, a broadcaster, a venue or a platform as an additional insured. Can our insurance do that?

A media package generally can and a standard professional indemnity policy generally cannot, which is why this clause catches content businesses out. The media wordings we place carry a condition extending the indemnity to a party the insured has agreed in writing to indemnify, and it can respond ahead of that party's own insurance where the contract requires it. Standard professional indemnity wordings usually have no equivalent mechanism and commonly exclude liability the insured has taken on under a contract. The time to check is before signing, because by the time anyone reads the policy the clause is normally already in the agreement.

Does media liability insurance cover defamation?

On the media wordings we place, yes, where that clause has been purchased: defamation sits in the policy as primary cover, alongside related claims such as injurious falsehood, product disparagement and invasion of privacy, and it can extend to a failure to credit an author. Standard professional indemnity wordings typically reach defamation only through an extension, and often only where the insured did not intend to defame. What any particular policy covers is set by its own wording and schedule, so the answer for a specific business is in its documents rather than in the product name.

Does media liability insurance cover copyright or trademark infringement in work we deliver?

Usually yes, where the clause has been purchased: media wordings grant intellectual property infringement cover as primary cover, reaching copyright, trademark, passing off, plagiarism and misuse of someone's concept or format. Two catches matter. Patent infringement is commonly excluded from media wordings with no way back in. And a claim that a licence was overrun is normally pleaded as royalties owed to the licensor, which falls inside the exclusion for licence and royalty payments, with cover returning only where the insured acted in good faith and did not know they were in breach. For a business that licenses heavily, those are the two clauses to read before relying on the cover.

Where to go next

Before you sign the next contract, find out what your policy actually says.

Tell us your name and number and what you need, and we will read the wording against the work you do. If a standard professional indemnity policy is still the right home for your cover, we will tell you that instead.

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