One frustration for United States owners of copyrights and other intellectual property assets is combating infringers based in foreign locations. The United States Constitution limits the ability to sue a foreign person or company in a United States court. Suing in a United States court requires that the foreign person or company has some relationship or engage in some type of activity within the state in which the lawsuit is filed.
For that reason, some businesses organize offshore to make it difficult for copyright owners to pursue their infringing behavior.
The Case of Mygazines
The website, Mygazines, encourages visitors to digitize and upload articles from popular magazines. Its opening page indicates that “Mygazines is your place to browse, share, archive and customize unlimited magazine articles uploaded by you, the Mygazines community.” While many view that business model as blatant copyright infringement, Mygazine refutes this characterization in an email sent to various media.
Although Mygazines listed its address as a post office box in Aguilla, the magazine publishers used domain name and trademark registration records to trace the site’s founder to Toronto, Canada. The publishers – which include over a dozen major magazine publishers including Time, Inc., McGraw-Hill, and Reader’s Digest - then filed lawsuits in New York and in Canada.
Mygazines Contacts with the United States Once cornered, Mygazines seemingly caved. The court docket indicates that Mygazines never filed a response or any other documents in the New York state case. Instead, Mygazines settled with the publishers which resulted in the voluntary dismissal of the lawsuit. Neither party is discussing the terms of the settlement. However, the publishers’ content has been removed from the Mygazines website.
The publishers argued that the site’s relationship to New York was based in part on the site exchanging information with New York residents and inducing New York residents to commit copyright infringement. While those aren’t the strongest arguments for personal jurisdiction by a New York court, Mygazines chose not to challenge personal jurisdiction. Perhaps that’s because fighting personal jurisdiction in Canada – where the owners actually live – would be difficult.
