â€œGlossyâ€ publishers against digital piracy

21st August 2008

â€œGlossyâ€ publishers against digital piracy The list of the most ruthless fighters with digital piracy (until recently, including representatives of music recording and movie industry) was added with U.S. publishers of magazines publishers.
The publishers paid special attention to a recently opened site Mygazines.com, encouraging residents of the net to copy and upload fresh magazinesâ€™ issues. Registered visitors of the resource (counting over fifteen hundred) are offered high-quality "scans" from dozens of popular publications, including People, Menâ€™s Health and The Economist.
A recent press release by the administration of Mygazines stated that the proposed copies of magazines are no different from those copies, which can be found at the reception of a doctor or a hairdresser. However, in the opinion of lawyers, hired by large publishing houses, this assertion is not quite precise, since visitors are offered only copies of periodicals, not magazines themselves. As stated in the first sale doctrine, â€œwhen buying a physical copy of a copyright-protected product, the buyer may dispose it them at its own discretion, but has no right to make copiesâ€. According to lawyers, the service is a flagrant violation of the existing copyright-legislation, but now publishers can close the resource and claim damages.
In the course of the investigation it was revealed that the domain name Mygazines belongs to an offshore company registered on some of the Caribbean islands. These islands are self-governing overseas British territory and therefore are outside of the USA jurisdiction. Moreover, the perpetrators are not at all going to contact the authorities, lawyers and the publishing companies do not have the opportunity to invite them to court even.
Meanwhile, the resource keeps on successfully functioning.

â€œGlossyâ€ publishers against digital piracy

â€œGlossyâ€ publishers against digital piracy