Magazine sharing website Mygazines has closed due to financial problems just weeks after losing a court battle against a large number of magazine publishers from around the world.
Last month a collective of magazine publishers, most from America and Britain, were successful in a copyright lawsuit against the website that invited users to upload and share entire scanned issues of magazines.
Lawyers representing publishers – which included IPC’s parent company Time Warner, Natmag owner Hearst, Hachette and Reed Business Information – settled their case against the owners of the site, although the terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
All titles published by companies involved in the lawsuit were removed from the site, leaving an Ikea catalogue and a small number of obscure publications.
The website has posted a letter stating that due to ‘monetary reasons and the state of the global economy’it had to close.
‘We simply ran out of funds to support the daily operations. We thank you for your patronage.”
The statement also invited any publishers interested in understanding more about ‘the site’s model and vision for the future of the publishing industry going forward, or to discuss our business to business model opportunities’to contact them on an email address.
The Mygazines domain name was owned by a company in Anguilla and constantly shifted its web host from country to country.
The PPA alerted its members to the site in July this year, but cease and desist letters sent to the PO Box address on the website were unsuccessful so it recommended that members teamed up with legal action taking place in America and Canada.
The site was eventually tracked down by American law firm David Wright Tremaine LLC to an individual living in Toronto, Canada, identified as Darren Andrew Budd.
In July, an individual claiming to be behind Mygazines wrote to Press Gazette under the name John Smith, claiming he was not acting as a “pirate” and said that critics were “completely missing our revenue model”.
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