MPA Goes After Mygazines (If They Can Find Them)

And so it goes…

MPA Sues Magazine-Sharing Site In the latest iteration of possibly illegal digital content-sharing, a new Web site, Mygazines.com, allows members to share digital editions of magazines — in essence reading them for free, according to Folio:, which first reported the news. American magazine publishers are not amused: the Magazine Publishers of America is suing Salveo Limited, the owner of the British site, which is incorporated on Anguilla, a British territory in the Caribbean.

Dear MediaPost: I covered it a week before FOLIO did.  Just so you know…

We’ll see where this all ends up. What could be at stake here is the viability of free self-service publications. After all, Issuu isn’t any different than Mygazines and it didn’t take me more than a minute to find content on their site which appears to be in copyright violation.

Issuu, in their defense, seems to have put a lot of effort in recent months in removing copywritten submissions, but how much work this requires is anyone’s guess. And if these sites get more lawsuits than they get revenue (currently, they’re getting zero revenue), what will become of them?

All of this leads us to two opinions:

David Renard has written that DME’s (digital magazine enablers) should be looking at how to handle the self-service market if and when e-paper hits. While he’s right, the real question here is how the public will behave when handed such a tool, more so than if the technology will be ready. As of now, results certainly vary.

If you are a publisher and your digital edition is important to you, and by important we mean you’re doing this to make money (advertising) or save money (distribution), you should look long and hard before experimenting with such a service, lest you wake up and find the company tired of making zero money and being saddled with lawsuits.