Mygazines.com is a site where users can upload and read hundreds of magazines online for free (they’re currently listing just over 800 titles). Mygazines.com website – a Flash-driven collection of popular magazines scanned and submitted by its users. All the big names are available – everything from FHM and GQ to Harvard Business Review and Tactical Weapons Magazine. The interface is pretty swish, too: providing you’ve got a Flash-enabled browser, each magazine is presented in a two-page spread just like the real thing – complete with page-turning animations. Bookmarks are available to jump straight to the articles that interest you. With its tagline, “upload. share. archive.”, it may have been inevitable that the magazine-sharing Web site Mygazines.com would face allegations of copyright infringement. The site is free to join, and there are no advertisements, but that hasn’t allayed concerns of magazine publishers.

Mygazines.com encourages people to copy and upload popular magazines that are currently on newsstands. Visitors can read high-quality digital copies of dozens of current titles, including People, Men’s Health and The Economist, in their entirety. “It’s pretty hard to see how it’s anything other than a straightforward set of copyright violations,” says intellectual property lawyer Jeffrey Cunard. The publishers might face some difficulty in taking legal action against Mygazines.com as the site’s domain name is registered in the Caribbean island of Anguilla, a British overseas territory, and is hosted in Sweden, thus squarely outside the jurisdiction of US copyright laws. Publishers could’ve take action had the company’s servers been hosted in the US, or used servers physically in the US. Given that Mygazines.com has neither, they can only pursue legal action on the basis that the content on the site is available in the US, but they can’t really pull the company representatives to court or claim 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.

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 4:58 am | by Kur-nia-one |