User blog comment:KyleH/Introducing: Magazine Creator/@comment-20644-20091026221027

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:


 * 1) Copying (as is the user)
 * 2) Distributing
 * 3) 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.