How Not to Share Your Magazines: Online

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

You buy a magazine. You’re free to give it to a friend for him to read. That’s the First Sale doctrine, which allows you to sell or give away something you’ve purchased. What it doesn’t allow you to do is copy it.

Mygazines.com doesn’t agree with that, however. According to the site:

Mygazines is your free place to browse, share, archive and customize unlimited magazine articles uploaded by you, the Mygazines community.

Oh yes, you read that right. Users upload magazines to the site and you can read either whole magazines or articles. You can even take specific articles from different magazines and combine them into your own “mygazine.”

Besides the obvious: “why would anyone want to take time to scan their magazines and upload them” … and the also obvious “most of this content is avaiable online anyway,” there’s the “this is so infringing on copyright.”

Of course, there was at least one Maxim calendar there; you probably can’t find that online.

The scans are also very good. So good, it makes you wonder if they might have had their own staff do it (ahem) to attract users.

The site did take the precaution of registering their domain name in Anguilla. And their contact name is so unsuspicious, too:

owner-name: Salveo Limited
organisation: Salveo Limited
person: John Smith
address: Mitchell House
zipcode: P.O. Box 17
city: The Valley
country: Anguilla
phone: +40.312249340

Hey, there’s a phone number! Oh, no one answers. Hey, there’s a Salveo, Ltd. in the U.K.! Oh, they’re not affiliated. Hmmm. Curiouser and curiouser.

Frankly, their method of flipping the pages in a magazine is kinda cool (I hate to say it). On the other hand, I’m not sure how they’re going to make money, since memberships are free. AP says several magazine publishers are considering legal action (no!).

It’s unclear how they’d get someone in Anguilla into U.S. court, but hey, knock yourselves out. Since it doesn’t appear there’s a way to make money from this site, it’ll probably die out soon enough anyway.