An industry at risk
A new website, Mygazines.com, encourages people to copy, upload and share popular magazines. It is a troubling development for publishers and suggests the industry could be hit by the same wave of piracy that has engulfed the music industry.
It is difficult to pin down who is behind Mygazines. The domain is registered to a “John Smith” (seems unlikely) of Anguilla, an island in the Caribbean. It’s hosted on a server in Sweden and is registered to a company called Salveo. A Google search of Salveo returns a London-based health and fitness company, which denies any involvement in the site.
Publications like The Economist and publishers like Time Warner have already expressed dismay at the website and are threatening to sue. “We take our intellectual property seriously and are considering appropriate action,” The Economist said in a statement to Associated Press.
But how do publishers sue, and who do they sue? It’s difficult to enforce copyright across national borders, especially in countries where intellectual property rights are not adequately enforced.
According to Declan McCullagh, a US technology journalist, Mygazines is hosted by the same Stockholm-based company that owns the BitTorrent tracker site Pirate Bay, which is used for sharing copyrighted material, from music to movies, on the Internet.
“If Time [Warner] and other publishers are looking to thwart Mygazines and its more than 16 000 users, it may have to go after VeriSign, which maintains the master dot-com database,” McCullagh says.
And pursue legal action they should. Mygazines is a blatant infringement of copyright and could cause significant damage to publishers. It’s a good deal more insidious than peer-to-peer technologies such as BitTorrent, which can, and often are, used to share files legally. Many Linux distributions, for example, are available through BitTorrent.
Though most of BitTorrent traffic consists of pirated material, it would be wrong to go after the technology behind it, which can be, and is, used for perfectly innocent purposes. The recording and movie industries are quite right to pursue pirates, though the ham-handed way they’ve approached the problem has done them more harm than good. Mygazines, unlike BitTorrent, has only one purpose in mind: wilful violation of copyright.
Yet, in online forums, some people have come to Mygazine’s defence. Some argue that because the website is redistributing advertisements along with the magazines, publishers should think twice about trying to block the site. The more people who view the ads, their argument goes, the more the magazines’ potential to profit from advertising.
But this shows a profound lack of understanding of how the publishing industry works. Magazines’ ad rates are based on their audited circulation, the number of copies they can prove they have sold. Publishers have no idea how many people are reading their magazines at Mygazines and have no way of including that data in their audited figures.
There’s no doubt that the Internet is posing a big challenge to publishers. Newspaper publishers in the US have borne the brunt of a move out of print and to the Web. Daily newspaper circulations have fallen sharply in recent years, with advertisers fleeing with readers to the Web. Magazines are also feeling the online pressure. The US Audit Bureau of Circulations says newsstand sales of US magazines fell 6,3% in the first half of 2008.
With an economic downturn and declining circulations, the last thing magazine publishers need right now is to have to fight a rearguard action against digital pirates. Publishers should pursue Mygazines, and sites like it, to the maximum extent possible under the law. It’s just a pity they can hide so well.
First published as the column Technology & You in the Financial Mail of August 22 2008
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