Thursday, January 22, 2009

the magazine napster goes legit

Thanks to the Canadian Magazines blog for continuing to follow this fascinating story.

A couple years ago, an Ontario-based tech and magazine fan, Darren Budd, decided to merge his two interests. The result was mygazines.com, a file-sharing site in which members were encouraged to scan the complete contents of physical magazines and "share" them online with fellow members. As you might imagine, the people paying the bills and sweating the talent to create those physical magazines became very interested in the mygazines "business model." Through US and Canadian courts, mygazines went away.

And now it's back, promising to be a better citizen. Budd had this to say about the earlier, now defunct, file-sharing site:

Bottom line is, we didn’t handle it right. We had a great technical idea, we had a very good site that could be good for the industry, but we didn’t handle it properly... at the end of the day, you can blame anybody you want. We took bad advice and followed it, and I will take responsibility for it.

Full interview with Budd about the very intriguing mygazines 2.0 here.

My favorite part:

I came up with the idea about two and a half years ago. I was standing in a magazines store and thought, gee, I want one article from that magazine, two articles from that, and I only have a limited budget - and even if I have an extended budget, I’m going to have too many magazines to carry..."

Ow, copyright is so heavy.

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