The Brigham Young University’s Time Magazine Corpus website is amazing. Suddenly, every issue of Time since 1923 is at your fingertips, accessible on a relatively easy to use website. You can see which nouns or verbs have increased or decreased in a specific time period, see changes in the English language itself, even see how the meaning of words have changed over time. This could be an invaluable tool to millions of people! Except it’s unethical.
Now, I can’t say with any certainty that Time-Warner (or whatever the parent company is now) hasn’t seen this site and chosen to ignore it. That’s entirely plausible. I also don’t know the exact copyright laws the magazine has, but I’m fairly sure that Time is not entirely public domain. There’s something a little weird about the fact that the website contains every issue from 1923 onward. This makes it seem like the author(s) of this website are thumbing their noses at copyright laws a bit, even if what they’re doing isn’t technically illegal. Copyright law has always been a touchy subject but people must educate themselves if they believe they are going to be in a position where it could be possible that they will violate a copyright.
That being said, I’ll be the first to admit that I really like finding free stuff on the Internet. Stuff that’s easy and accessible and doesn’t cost huge amounts of money is always a good thing. But I also know that people who are choosing to knowingly violate copyrights need to understand that it’s not cool, it’s not ethical, it’s not morally right, and they probably will get caught and fined.
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