Defending your copyright

There are a few other posts out there that deal with defending your copyright amid the potential Orphan Works Act.

Rob Haggart mentioned the site mygazines.com, which basically shows scanned versions of many magazines free of charge. This spurred debate on how freely available photographer's (and other creative) content is bound to become with changing technology. Apparently the magazines fought back.

As we know, the cover price of a magazine is a drop in the bucket for their revenue, while the real money is made on the advertising. I'm not sure why publishing companies would be upset about mygazines.com. As I see it, it simply puts more eyeballs on the pages. If the publishers could properly document it, they would certainly raise their ad rates.

Maybe mygazines.com didn't want to share that data, so the publishers did the next best thing and propped up a copyright claim to get them to stop. It follows YouTube and Yahoo settling similar claims. It seems the dam is leaking. How long the bubblegum will hold remains to be seen.