Magazines Are Being Pirated on a Massive Scale

Mygazines.com is a new online community where users scan entire magazines and post them online for free browsing. Seen above, for example, is a complete copy of the August 2008 issue of Vogue. Poke around on Mygazines and you'll find entire issues of Bazaar, GQ, Maxim, Star, National Geographic and many other titles both mainstream and obscure. This entire site, as far as I can tell, is one giant hive of copyright violations.

Shocked? Come on, you knew this was coming. Publishers now face the same headache that has afflicted the music and movie industries: Whatever steps they take to prevent it, their content is ending up available online for free.

(It's unclear who runs Mygazines. Probably bogus Whois registry information links it to the Caribbean island of Anguilla and a phone number with the country code for Romania.)

Obviously this opens a whole can of worms if you're a magazine photographer for one of the titles being scanned and posted online.

Comments

[Richard Prinz]

Once you scan it, it becomes a "new thing", right? So what's the problem? What do you mean "copyright infringement"? I don't get your point. Signed, Richard Prinz

[MarcW]

Dear Richard:

You're not funny. Not even a little bit. And I am the king of not-funny. Ask anybody.

M

[Thomas Locke Hobbs]

It still sucks to read a magazine spread on an LCD screen. It's not like listening to an mp3 where you'll be hard-pressed to hear a difference in the sound quality.

I wouldn't be too worried about this site canabalizing subs & newsstand sales. Also, no one seems to have uploaded any scans of PDN yet. Boo!!

[Michael]

So where's Playboy?!?!

[M D]

This is horrible! It's not funny - people who think it's funny are clearly not in the business and sound pretty imature. They've never had their images stolen or paid for more than some cheap gear. No respect! If they could only understand that it's even worse than having your pay check stolen over and over!

Seems like there needs to be more education about copyright infringement, image rights etc. I've had it done to me and I know people that have sued and won three figure settlements for it.

Foreign countries don't have the same copyright rules, so I'm not surprised but it is sooooooooo wrong!

[FA]

haha, three figure settlements.. sweet.