Mygazine — The Pirate Bay’s latest venture?
p2pnet news view | P2P:- The Pirate Bay has for years been seriously pissing off the entertainment cartels.
Is it now going after the magazine publishing industry?
“What is Mygazines?” - asks Mygazines, launched last month, answering itself:
“Mygazines is your free place to browse, share, archive and customize unlimited magazine articles uploaded by you, the Mygazines community.”
Listed on the site are the likes of Wired, Time, Lucky, MacWorld, Entertainment, Men’s Journal and Adbusters.
“Silly media pirates!” says Wired’s Epicenter, going on »»»
You don’t even have to go through the trouble of all that! You can simply view our entire issue online for free! In digital form! No mediocre scans!
It is fairly common for dead tree media to shovel their entire editions online anyway - making the text searchable, Digg-able, and linkable - so the demographic for scanned paper eludes us. Sure, their flash “Flipbook” format is pretty cool, but posting print content is typically not popular with readers.
It is also hard to believe that that many people are willing to sit around and scan every page of any magazine, what with World of Warcraft beckoning 24/7. Perhaps if they had an anonymous staff doing it for them. Hmmmm …
“It’s pretty hard to see how it’s anything other than a straightforward set of copyright violations,” the Associated Press has Jeffrey Cunard, an intellectual property lawyer, saying, going on:
“There are entire magazines with no commentary, no criticism —- clearly not a case of classic fair use.”
And Time Warner Time division spokeswoman Dawn Bridges says the company investigating its options, “including ways to have the site shut down,” according to AP, noting, “It’s not clear how Mygazines would make money. There are no advertisements, and users can register for free.”
Meanwhile, “Mygazines is registered in the Caribbean island of Anguilla and hosted in Sweden, by the notorious PRQ,” says CNET News, adding »»»
The Stockholm-based PRQ is owned by the founders of BitTorrent tracker site Pirate Bay and is known for hosting other dubious sites.
With its domain name registered abroad and its servers beyond U.S. borders as well, Mygazines seems to have slipped around the jurisdiction of U.S. copyright law. Even though publishers could pursue legal action against the site for material available in the U.S., there’d be no way to get representatives for the company to court or to collect damages.
So if Time and other publishers are looking to thwart Mygazines and its more than 16,000 users, it may have to go after VeriSign, which maintains the master .com database.
Or, it could look across the Atlantic. It’s not an impossible task: in February 2008, a Swedish prosecutor charged four men connected to Pirate Bay with conspiracy to violate copyright law; a week later, a Danish ISP was ordered to block Pirate Bay.
Definitely stay tuned.
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.Stumble It!
Epicenter -Magazine-Sharing Site Debuts… Ha!, August 15, 2008
Associated Press -New magazine-sharing site may violate copyrights, August 15, 2008
CNET News - New magazine-sharing site escapes copyright laws abroad, August 15, 2008
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August 18th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Put up some Comix, and Playboy and youve got me
August 19th, 2008 at 3:01 am
they have playboy and several other nudie mags. Didn’t see comix
August 20th, 2008 at 12:54 am
You can find comix at a bunch of other places, Piratebay, mininova, Z-cult, etc. Or on Direct Connect.