I’ve written before about how it’s not just music and movies that suffer piracy online; anything that can be digitized is vulnerable, and any creative work can be digitized. The latest, as many reports have indicated, is the magazine industry.

Piracy isn’t new to the magazine world; there’s a reason why the Magazine Publishers of America and the publisher of Time and other leading magazines belong to the Copyright Alliance. But a web site called Mygazines.com takes theft to an entirely new level. Essentially, users scan entire issues of magazines and then upload them, allowing anyone in the world to read the magazine without paying for it, and without the magazine being able to receive appropriate compensation from advertisers.

As somebody who has been employed with and has freelanced for numerous magazines over the years, I find this completely offensive. I’m not sure who is more repulsive — the operators of the site that registered offshore with false Whois information to avoid copyright law, or the indivduals who are actually investing their time in scanning magazines and uploading them. It’s the same disgust that I had for the loser who uploaded a scanned pre-release version of the final Harry Potter novel.

These actions are indefensible, yet there are already people posting comments on some sites defending it. Some say infringement is old news so get over it. Some say print is dead so get over it.

I say journalism is something to value in this country, and intellectual property is something to value. Every day there are reports of more layoffs of journalists being laid off in this country? Is this all due to copyright? No. Some is. And some of it is due to a general lack of respect for what goes into quality journalism. Anyone who cares about the spread of information in a free society should recognize the role professional journalists play and avoid in any way supporting P2P infringement of printed works.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 4:33 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, internet, p2p, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.