Site lets you check out your favorite magazines and share them with family or friends without charge and whenever and wherever you choose.
Mygazines is a new content sharing site on the block that deserves some attention for being the interesting new brainchild that it is. Launched a few weeks ago, it bills itself as the "world’s largest digital magazine site."
The Mygazines concept is simple, it essentially allows users to share magazines in the "same manner a doctors’ office, law firm, libraries, and hair salons would with their clients every day." The site allows users to read, archive and upload content for everyone to read and share within the online magazine community.
According to the people behind Mygazines it’s was created for a myriad of reasons, including but not limited to:
- Low Carbon Footprint. With 70% of newsstand magazines going unsold, our goal is to eliminate the waste.(save the trees!)
- No unnecessary content. Allows users to access only the information that is of interest to them, without having to pay for unwanted content.
- Efficiency. Reduces the need to physically carry and archive content.
- Universal. Allows foreign content to be available from anywhere to anyone.
- Monopoly. Eliminates the effects of conglomerates merging and controlling consumers’ choice and distribution, within almost every region worldwide.
Hard to disagree with them, especially the waste and efficiency factor, but I’m not so sure people in the magazine biz are so easily convinced of the site’s lofty environmental benefits.
In fact, Dawn Bridges, a spokeswoman for Time Warner Inc.’s Time division, said the publisher of People, Sports Illustrated and other titles is already investigating its legal options, including ways to have the site shut down.
“It’s pretty hard to see how it’s anything other than a straightforward set of copyright violations,” said Jeffrey Cunard, an intellectual property lawyer with Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in Washington. “There are entire magazines with no commentary, no criticism – clearly not a case of classic fair use.”
However, it may be a tough case to fight being that Mygazines’s domain name is registered in the island of Anguilla, a British territory in the Caribbean, and hosted by the PRQ, the same company that hosts The Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker site, and thus placing the site outside the jurisdiction of US copyright laws.
Now they could sue the company in the US since it makes content available to Americans, but they would not be able to force anybody from Mygazines to show up in US courts nor be able to collect any damages for any ruling made in absentia.
Probably not helping any is the fact that there is an ongoing contest whereby Mygazines will award $1000 USD each months to the member who signs up the most friends, and $5000 USD to the member who signs up the most friends by February 1st, 2009.
In any event the site may hopefully be around for a while and here are some of the key features to check out:
- Ability to create your own custom magazine (mygazines) from various articles in different magazines, and share them with other users.
- Allows for ALL published material to be uploaded and viewed.
- Receive notifications, setup by member, to receive articles of interest for various topics and at times convenient for the user. (Health/Medical topics, finance,etc)
Browse articles from you favorite mags…
Share your favorite articles with your friends and family via e-mail…
…or create your own magazine compiled with articles you’ve previously tagged and saved.
I've been interested in P2P since the early, high-flying days of Napster and KaZaA. I believe that analog copyright laws are ill-suited to the digital age, and that art and culture shouldn't be subject to the whims of international entertainment industry conglomerates. Twitter | Google Plus
I give it a month tops before the industry has it shut down and the owners's sued out of existance.
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