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Doctor’s office NOT! New magazine site goes beyond fair use and steals from copyright holders—writers included
August 16, 2008 | 7:41 am
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By David Rothman
Gang, you already know how much I detest DRM. The same feeling applies toward mass piracy of books and other items.
So, no, I’m hardly the biggest fan of a new site called Mygazines.com, a "sharing" service which might well expand from magazines into books. No one’s said it would. But that’s my hunch if the site survives.
Flipbook tech
Mygazines uses Flipbook technology, and how here’s the twist. Flipbook really sucks compared to the regular Web, to which many magazines are posting the same stuff for free. A Wired blog also points out that many readers have better uses for their time than magazine scanning. That’s Good News.
I’m truly hoping for Mygazines to fail if it doesn’t get shut down. There’s Good Free and Bad Free. Good Free means ad revenue for publishers and writers. Bad Free means no revenue or reduced revenue. On the Web the real magazines can insert interactive advertising rather than just images of ads, can track demographics and can monetize the content more easily.
I won’t buy the pathetic excuse that Mygazine is one big doctor’s office—full of reading fare—rather than a rip-off. Doctor’s office don’t spread around hundreds or even thousands of "free" copies.
OK, I bet many TeleBlog readers will disagree with me. Go ahead: we post all kinds of opinions here. Have at it! Meanwhile it’ll be interesting to see if the copyright folks can shut the site down. The domain’s address is in The Valley, Anguilla.
What Mygazine could do: Work out deals with publishers and serve as a sample dispenser. Or it might carry ads and share revenue.
Technorati Tags: Mygazines
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Comments:
Very interesting indeed.
The safe harbor provision of the DMCA protects the operator of a web site against liability for the misdeeds of users of that site, e.g. David can’t be held responsible for libelous statements or copyright violations for which I’m responsible in TeleBlog comments. This is a Good Thing.
To retain their safe harbor protections, however, site operators must honor “take down” notices from copyright holders who object to the inclusion of their content on a site. I expect we’ll see a raft of take down notices issued to Mygazine very soon, and they’d have to have a death wish if they failed to honor them.
Copyright owners argue that having to issue a take down notice for every individual violation is an onerous burden, and that web site operators should have to filter content uploaded to their sites. That’s what Viacom v. Google is all about with regard to copyrighted material posted to YouTube. But there are several key differences between Mygazine and YouTube:
(1) A user ID is associated with every video posted to YouTube. I see no attributions for the content posted to Mygazines.
(2) Google profits from ads placed on YouTube pages, and Viacom argues that revenue generated from pages that contain its content is rightly due to them, not Google. As far as I can tell from a quick visit, Mygazines has no ads — not yet, anyway.
(3) A recent independent survey estimates that less than 20% of YouTube’s content constitutes a violation of copyright. At first glance it appears that 100% of Mygazine’s content violates copyright law. This makes Mygazine more similar to Napster (version 1.0) than YouTube, and we all know what happened to Napster.
(4) Google has deep pockets and can survive a protracted legal battle with Viacom. Unless its lawyers itend to test some non-obvious legal loopholes, which is a very real possibility, Mygazine will probably crumble like a stale cookie when Time Warner files suit against them.
This should be a fun show to watch. Everybody grab your popcorn and pull up a chair….
Pardon the double post, but after further investigation:
(1) According to the RIPE database, the IP address of “www.mygazines.com” (88.80.7.243) belongs to a Swedish co-location service.
(2) According to the the “www.who.is” database, the “mygazines.com” domain is registered with “gandi.net”, a domain registrar located in France.
(3) According to Gandi’s “whois” database, the “mygazines.com” domain is registered by a company called Salveo Limited whose business address is a box number in Anguilla.
(4) A Google search for Salveo Limited seems to indicate that the company is incorporated in the U.K.
Looks like Pirate Bay, print edition. It certainly appears that pursing this matter through legal channels will be a lot more complicated than issuing DMCA take down notices. Where would a suit be filed? Anguilla? England? Sweden? Your guess is as good as mine (IANAL.)
Oh, and by the way, there ain’t nothin’ magic about Mygazine’s “flipbook” format — it’s just a Flash application.
Great details, Todd. Alas, you could be right. The company is structured to be able to flout U.S. copyright laws. But things are so obvious that maybe other countries will cooperate, knowing that similar tricks could be used with their own content providers.
Thanks,
David
The articles I’ve read about this operation clearly stated that this was not based in the US so naturally the DMCA would not be applicable.
Is this site a bad thing? Maybe. Perhaps though it will be another kick in the shins of another “old media” provider prompting them to re-examine their distribution practices.
While their “doctor’s office” analogy may not hold legal water I don’t think that the idea is far-fetched at all. How many eyeballs each month view each copy of a mag in a reception area or library? Hundreds?
I think a site like this is a potential gold mine for magazine publishers. For many decades I used to subscribe to a few dozen magazines and also buy a few dozen single issues of various magazines at the newsstand each month that I didn’t need to (or couldn’t afford to) get each month.
As more and more magazine publishers are moving at least some if not all of their content online I have subsequently saved a LOT of money in the past few years by canceling most of my subscriptions (I now only subscribe to about a dozen).
Ads that are in the print versions are usually quite different from the web site and I generally prefer the ad content in the print versions and don’t really care about the whole interactive crap. If I’m interested in the product I can go to their site later. Actually, mygazine is creating clickable links to articles from each issues content page so they could do the same for the ads which would have the same trackable/payment aspects as links on a publishers web site.
Some of the magazines I used to read frequently are foreign publications and in recent years they have become so expensive that I quit buying them altogether.
If a site like mygazines.com can eventually work out arrangements to monetize the content and share that with the various publishers I think that would be a win-win for everyone.
Howsabout a buffet type of pricing? If I could sign up on mygazine.com for say $40/month for “all I can eat” (assuming they have a well stocked selection of titles) I would be a very happy camper.
I think in this case everybody is exaggerating a lot.
After browsing the site, I found no way at all to save locally a magazine – and that’s what worries most any publisher. Yes, you can save a magazine – but in a favorites list. Yes, you can email it – but you email just a link to it.
After browsing “Skateboarding Magazine”, I’m sure that this site is a golden mine for publishers, not the opposite. Given the interface, you get the flavour of the magazine, while at the same time being almost completely unable to read any article… and forget about printing it too.
My bet is that no suit will hit Anguilla, England or Sweden …
alessandro
Everyone: Thanks for your thoughtful replies! I agree the issues are not entirely clear-cut. But it’s certainly fascinating how the operation is so expertly structured to thwart copyright attorneys. I still consider this to be questionable in fair use terms. We’re still talking about much more eyes than a magazine might get in a doctor’s office. That said, I agree it would be wonderful if the site and publishers could make peace to everyone’s advantage. David