Most periodicals have an on-line edition so this is a bit pointless. 

You get the hard copy because there's lots of places you can't read an on-iine magazine and, anyway, its your way of paying for the website. Most magazine subscriptions in the US are cheap as well -- the publisher's not interested in the cover price, it wants to sell your demographics to their advertisers.

See also www.digi-zines.com. Legal though


Collecting data of the subscribers (people who register) and then sell the data to the copyright owners ... hopefully not.

Just kidding :-)

It might very well be a Reichstag thing. Set up by one or more of the powers that be in order to convince people censoship of the 'Net is necessary. Watch for attempts to get website blocking legislation passed.

A web site dubbed FMA (Argentine Babes Forum) was a popular site [we're told] that until a couple years ago offered full, high-res scans of magazines dealing with, gee, semi-naked babes.

It was all piracy, from a legal POV. Although the camera POV was often much better.

It was shut down by pressure from the magazine publishers who also happened to be, gee, the copyright owners.

Having a lookie, I see that some pirate scanned in Wired magazine.... not realising that Wired put up pretty much all their content for free on Wired.com

Actually a number of mags and many newspapers actually have most of their content up on a site anyway.

But seriously, scanning magazines? Who, with internet access would even bother to download to read what is all over free blogs anyway? For a given magazine I can think of a dozen blogs of a higher standard and all the good mags probably are the print version of a blog site (like wired) ... all that and I can't post comment to a scanned page!

The print industry has other problems.

Take really HOT material, too HOT to transmit & impress it upon cigerette rolling paper by way of water mark.

Idea being, kids will burn evidence, if you include some Herb. Just Paper itself is suspect without additonal pirate watermarkings to communicate real TS Stuff, yet better Herb Faster Material Goes Up, About 100% saturation in 3 Puffs.
drashek

I tried it out with the September Wired magazine, which I'm subscribed to get, but which hasn't arrived in the mail yet.

Unfortunately, I could only view the left side of the blown up version of the pages on my Fedora 9 Firefox latest non-beta browser.

If the magazine makers are smart, which is doubtful, they will not only try to get the illegal copies taken down, but come up with their own version, except they'll charge advertisers to advertise on their version.

By only charging slightly more than it costs to provide the merchandise.

Hopefully this will make a significant enough impact to have publishers reconsider their own options and distribute their mags digitally at a reasonable price and accessible by standard non-proprietary means (drm is an ok compromise to protect their interests as long as its open and compatible) - instead of cutting down trees and coming up with new chemicals to make their covers glossier.

It's being hosted (according to FF3) in Sweden, and we all know how tricky those Swedish servers are to track down...

Be interesting to see what happens here.

Hate to mention it but ain't L'Inq part of a print media empire so maybe a little biased here ?

I've noticed that London's Sunday Times et al seem to mention that they are part of the evil Murdoch empire when they run stories about Sky etc.

Anyway, who wants to read a magazine on a computer (hang on, I am).