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Introducing: Magazine Creator
Make your own magazine!
Today we are launching a product unlike all others – Magazine Creator, a tool that lets you effortlessly transform your favorite wiki pages into high-gloss, professional looking, printed magazines. With just a couple of clicks, you can publish your own subscription-based magazine - covering characters, lore or your favorite quotes. The choice is yours.
- Use the magazine creator widget on the left to access the MagCloud toolbar. Just browse the wiki and add any articles you'd like in your magazine by clicking the “add” button.
- Rearrange your articles in the perfect order - Klingon weapons, favorite NASCAR drivers, best COD weapons or whatever you like!
- Design a cover, either by using our easy cover generator or uploading an image of your own.
- Then, publish your magazine directly to MagCloud. From there you can order as many copies as you like for you and your friends!
Magazine Creator is live for most English-language wikis that use the Monaco skin. As always, if you have any thoughts / questions, please leave a comment below!
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116 comments
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i want to say that is cool
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Neat idea... But I won't be buying cuz I'm a geek and a cheap-skate.
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Wow, sounds nice. Not so if it actually costs anything...
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maybe
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ya aya
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wow that sounds like that would come in handy
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While MyraPedia does not use content from any tv network or somesuch, many contributors are sensitive to the "making money off it" question, especially thoe artists from elfwood etc who are not involved in the project but allowed us to use their work noncommercially with attribution given. One way out seems to be, from where I stand, to disable the possibility to add to MagClouds service price for any CC-NC-SA wikia. Thus it would be clear that the creator of a mag-from-wikia does not profit financially from the nonprofit work (or the ccopyrighted content) of others. Just my 2cents (€uro-Cents, by the way) --IrasCignavojo 14:29, October 27, 2009 (UTC)
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@Michael - the service is providing a user with a direct reproduction of the fair use image and charging them for it. The printer would be getting money based on the service, yes, but they would be getting money based on the service of providing the content. The difference between that and the generating of ad revenue based on articles with fair use images is that it's astronomically difficult to prove that the fair use content is actually a factor in the ad revenue because the ad revenue is all about hits, and the hits may have absolutely nothing to do with the fair use images. People may not be going to those pages for the images. That allows for the "purpose and character of use" defense. That's opposed to purposely using the fair use content in the magazine and charging a fee for the service of providing a reproduction of said content.
@Enkrona - yeah, sorry if we're confusing you. It's a lot of legal stuff, lol.
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wait this is confusing
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To reinforce Anne Behnert's comments, you're paying for a service (printing), not the content (text, images).
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Because fair use images can be used in a commercial environment, a court would, in fact, end up looking at how that revenue is being generated and all of the factors involved in how the images are being used. It's not really a black and white issue. Fair use is much more complicated than just saying "you can do this and you can't do that."
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It still stands, if the images truly are fair use on the wiki, then they still are fair use somewhere else (that's the whole idea, actually, even for Wikipedia). Wikia is making money off of those images, here and now. Courts will not care if the profit comes from hits on a website or the printing of a magazine, the images are used in a commercial manner/environment.
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The MC still prints the content and financially benefits from it directly, and the MC is still responsible for the copying of that fair use content into a product that they then charge for, even if the charge is for the printing. As decided in "20th Century Fox Film Corp. v. Cablevision Systems Corp," a company that provides a means to copy copyrighted material is responsible for said material if there are any legal issues.
The company is considered to be doing the copying and the distributing, not the users. The user puts together the product, yes, and in doing so is also a party to the illegitimate use of the fair use material, but the biggest issue here is the money. MC is asking for and receiving a monetary transaction in order to distribute the copyrighted material to another person. MC is actually doing three things:
- Copying (as is the user)
- Distributing
- Receiving a financial transaction in order for the distribution to move forward
I can't imagine a court saying that that's just fine and dandy.
And while Wikia may indirectly profit from those images, "profit from good content" because "it keeps the viewer at the wiki" is a subjective measure of financial success because "good content" is subjective. It'd be next to impossible to prove what images Wikia was and was not financially benefiting from, so there's really no issue there. You can just as easily say Wikia is benefiting from the written content, not the images.
And for the last point, the "purpose and character of use," that can very easily go out the window if someone starts making money off of it. It's not impossible to defend that, nor is it impossible to defend using something for commercial use in a situation like this, but it is very, very, very, very, very difficult. Copyright holders could still sue, and multiple people involved in MC (Wikia, the user, and MC itself) could be sued. The lawsuits may not be successful (although I think they stand a good chance at being successful), but it could embroil Wikia, MC, and the users in them for quite a long while, wasting everyone's time and capital.
The best solution to this problem is having a magazine creator that takes out the printing of hard copies, thereby taking out the financial aspect of this. If it could simply be converted to a .PDF, allowing users to print it out on their own, it would be virtually foolproof and astronomically less vulnerable to legal issues than it is now.
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Actually the MC asks for money just for printing, the client is the one that designs the product. So it's his responsibility to ensure fair use.
Wikia actually does profit from (good) content, since it keeps the viewer at the wiki, surfing other pages.
If Wikipedia is any indication, the details of commercial nature don't matter, since the "purpose and character of use" are still the same (they wouldn't if you'd only print "File:" pages). In the end, you don't print images, but pages which show images under fair use, and this fair use still applies for those pages.
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It's a tricky situation, but from what I understand there is a distinct difference between fair use images appearing on websites that generate revenue based on hits instead of content and fair use images actually being placed into something like this Magazine Creator.
The difference, as I understand it, comes down to this. When Wikia receives money, it's not actually based on content and therefore fair use still applies, as it's page hits. Whether or not the image is there is irrelevant. With the Magazine Creator, however, the fact that the image is there is relevant, as the user is knowingly creating a magazine with that image and, by default, the printer is knowingly printing it and charging money directly for the printing of that content.
So essentially, it's an indirect vs. direct issue. Indirect is pretty safe for fair use, but the direct one isn't. The Magazine Creator is directly printing the content and asking a person for money for the final product.
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I can't quite follow. Fair use images are reproductions per se, if another reproduction of those reproductions takes place, nothing new happens. The fair use material is used in the same context, so it should still be fair use.
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An interesting point, but it’s one that could probably be countered. Ads are generating revenue based off the article hits, yes, however the magazine creator is reproducing the fair use content and then receiving money based off of that. Your point is a good one, but the reproduction of the fair use content involving a monetary transaction is the issue.
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@Brandon Rhea: Regarding fair use on CC-BY-SA wikis, the MagCreator changes nothing. Every commercially licensed wiki displays ads, so there already is profit made with copyrighted images. If you now take such a mag and say "Whoa! That's not fair use!", then it already never has been fair use on the wiki it's coming from.
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Hmmmmmm......ok, I will ask Tigernose and see what he thinks.
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Can you have pages from multiple wikis? For instance, a medley of pages from Command and Conquer, Starcraft, Silent hill, Resident evil, and Universe at War wikis? Or does it have to be all one wiki? Also, how much will it cost per issue?
