To magazine publishers, sharing is not caring.
Preview By: . Advertising Age, 8/4/2008, Vol. 79 Issue 30, p18-18, 2/5p, 1 color; (AN 33538678)
Above is an editorial article from Advertising Age that refers to the use of websites like mygazines.com that allow online sharing of magazines. In this article, The Magazine Publishers of America are claiming that these sharing sites are an infringement on their copyrights. However, the author of this article does not believe that these sites infringe on copyrights since magazines receive that majority of their revenue from advertisements. Nevertheless, in my opinion, this site and others like it are infringing on copyrights and harming the magazine publishers. Therefore, these sites should be shutdown. However, draw your own conclusions; the author makes some interesting points.
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2 comments:
This is an interesting one because unlike a movie or a cd the cost of production is almost entirely borne by advertisers. For advertisers, to know that your ad is reaching an even larger audience than you expected would be a huge motivation to continue to advertise in that journal/magazine. If the Mygazines site removed the ads and only showed the feature stories then I would be more inclined to agree with Magazine Publishers of America, but the ads remain. I have to agree with the author when he states, "If the alienating anti-piracy jihads from movie and music publishers have taught us anything, publishers should appreciate consumer's interest-and set about finding ways to meet it."
They have a "Publisher Program" listed on their site encouraging publishers to embrace the benefits and demographic statistics that can be gained by sharing their publications on mygazines.com. So, while some of the bigger names in publishing may want to put the kibosh on it, they may find a large audience of niche publishers and readers that encourage the site.
Although they are not altering or selling the material and it is in a different media format (not as likely to affect sales), one could argue that they are making more than a reference copy and republishing without permission in a different medium, so it may qualify as copyright infringement.
Interesting.
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