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...aaaand since this is the official "Japan is a bunch of sexist perverts" thread, it just so happened that the very next cover of Famitsu I uploaded was this one: Now imagine a Nintendo Power cover with Nester leering like a pervert as he peeks under Princess Peach's dress. Because had that mag been Japanese, it probably would have happened.

I was actually at karaoke last night with a bunch of co-workers, all guys. At some point, they selected an option I'd never seen before on the menu where the normal cheesy videos that play in the background were replaced by videos of girls who would undress and dance around seductively based on how well you were singing (it analyzes pitch, rhythm, volume, etc.) It was especially funny if you sang poorly - the clothes would go back on and the girls would start pouting and throwing you dirty looks. Sexism is definitely still alive and well in Japan. Normally, there are at least a couple of women with us at these things, so that's probably why I'd never seen anyone select this option before...

I admit I know nothing of German copyright law, so you may be right and getting written permission from a magazine's editor or publisher may be enough to grant full authorization. In America it's a bit more of a tangled web where it's kind of impossible to pin permission down to a single person when dealing with a publication like a magazine where dozens of people contributed to it in different capacities under different types of contracts granting them different amounts of ownership rights over those contributions. And that doesn't even cover the advertising. Still, you're right that the above website has at least reached out to someone to get their blessing (whether that makes it 100% legal or not is a question for a lawyer, I guess.) I wonder if any of the mags being offered on the site are still being produced? If so, kudos to them for being so generous. Once a mag and/or publisher goes out of business, they have less reason to be so strict, of course. We've had several people who worked in the industry in the past come to the site and express interest in obtaining scans of issues they worked on but no longer have copies of. But for mags still being produced, it's usually more complicated. American publishers generally won't openly allow free distribution of anything they have the potential to charge money for, even though they almost never make older content available, even at a price - in large part due to the copyright clusterf$%# mentioned above. Unlike books, things like magazines are generally meant to be printed once and sold for a strictly limited time, so how to go about dividing any further profits down the line from reprint sales is something that usually isn't taken into account when drawing up contracts, which is probably why official digital archives of mags are so rare. And if digital reprints ever do show up, they're almost always incomplete (the ads are usually the first thing to go.) The bottom line is, with permission or without, fan preservation sites are the only real hope we have of getting these mags out there. Btw, I LOLed a bit at the part about the guy at the above site spending his own money to buy stuff to scan like that was something unusual. I thought it was obvious, but that's what we ALL do. Aside from 3 issues I received as a donation, I bought every single mag I've ever scanned, as well as my scanning equipment, with my own money when I decided it was time to stop being a leecher and start giving something back. Projects like these have to be non-profit. The minute we or anybody else charges money for their scans is the minute they start begging to be shut down and possibly litigated against. By being non-profit, we generally avoid the ire of any of the myriad assortment of people out there who may have a stake in the rights to the issues. And we also have the exact same policy of immediately removing any content at the request of a rights-holder, as stated on our home page. All talk of download legalities and copyrights aside, for the record, this thread is about missing magazines in our database. Our database section has nothing to do with scanned magazines or our downloads section, and is simply a database of information. Our goal is to have ALL gaming mags archived in our database, regardless of how old or new they are, or whether they're owned by Nintendo or ex-publishers of Gamefan. Mags that are not allowed to be scanned still need to be in the database, so there's no need to withhold information about a mag just because it doesn't meet the requirements to be allowed for scanning.

This seems as good a thread as any to put this (also from a recent Famitsu). Fake boob T-shirts, anyone?