Mygazines.com, a website which hosted scanned versions of magazines in breach of copyright, has now closed. The closure comes on the back of a recent successful legal action brought in the US and Canada by a group of magazine publishers, including a number of FIPP members.

According to a statement on the website, “Due to monetary reasons and the state of the global economy, we unfortunately must close mygazines.com.”

PPA (UK) alerted FIPP that mygazines.com was hosting scanned versions of magazines, which the sites’ operators had turned into digital editions, back in July. FIPP warned its members whose content appeared on the site; further suggesting that they may want to issue cease and desist letters. Mygazines.com was hosted in the Caribbean using a bogus name, but its operators were finally located in Toronto and a legal action brought against them. A number of FIPP members, including IPC, Condé Nast, Future and Reed Business Information, were party to the successful action. The Canadian settlement ordered mygazines.com to remove the infringing content of the claimants - and take steps to ensure that content owned by the claimants was not reposted.

PPA legal executive, James Evans, commented that “despite the ingenuity and cunning the operators of mygazines.com demonstrated in concealing their true identity, magazine publishers view the threat of online piracy seriously enough to mount a concerted effort to have their content removed from infringing sites.”

The mygazines.com incident illustrates the threat that all content industries face from online piracy; this is not just an issue for the music and film industries.

Source: PPA