A serious question this.
Indie Game Magazine is a paid for 6-issues-a-year publication, available both online and in print, that features reviews of Indie games and articles aimed at the creators of such titles.
The cheapest normal subscription price is $19.95 a year (about $3.30 an issue) with an extra $5 on top if you want access to back issues and have access to “insider information” articles on the site. A print subscription costs $40 in the US and $50 in the UK and Canada.
Markup played with the idea of a printed edition long ago (images sadly were hosted elsewhere) and at least one other Game Maker magazine looked at the concept.
Indie Game Magazine are currently holding a “pay what you like” sale on the $24.95 subscription package. I say “pay what you like” but when I tried to get it for free (you will find out why later) I discovered that wasn’t truly accurate as I was met with an error “product:j_id112: Validation Error: Specified attribute is not between the expected values of 1 and 10,000.”
I have seen issues of the magazine before and decided that it wasn’t worth paying $3.30 an issue for. Essentially I judged the quality to be below that of GMTech which is available free. It is also considerably shorter – excluding the cover, contents pages, advert pages etcetera there are 14 pages of material in the January-February 2010 issue. It is not a bad magazine but I do not feel it merits a price tag when similar material is available on blogs – congratulations to the team behind it if they have been getting more than a handful of sales.
This brings me on to my main point. At the bottom of the front cover the magazine has the following notice:
“Indie Game Magazine is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. All game logos, screenshots, artwork, trademarks, etc are property of their respective owner.“
A link to the license is here which states “You are free: to Share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work”. So I just paid $1 to get something which it is perfectly legal to distribute freely. I had previously found back issues of the magazine on the Internet freely available to download (although the sites they are uploaded to do also contain obviously illegal material).
I paid my $1 so you don’t have to. Is there something I am missing here or would I be okay to upload/link to a copy?
Update: I have decided to make a download link available: Download Indie Game Mag Issue 8 for Jan-Feb 2010 (13.1 MB). Not sure if this is what they intended but it is legally sound. Please post your opinion of it here!
@Coolist
You are right, I assumed wrong.
I read it and I enjoyed the articles though. Pity its not free.
@Loaf
I don’t believe it is a GM magazine. I’m pretty sure it’s an Indie Magazine. Though, I’m sure it could have GM content in it.
I’m sure your supporting them when you pay. Though it could be a mistake? I donno.
You’re well within your legal rights to upload it. You’re not missing anything.
Post it Phil!
If the license does indeed say you are free to copy and distribute the file, then it should be legal to post a link here.
This is probably an oversight on their part. Pretty funny either way, though. It’s important to read the text for your license before you release work under it!
Well, I downloaded it and I’m gonna take a read. I’d never pay for a GM magazine.