I subscribe to a magazine, and occasionally e-mail articles from it to friends. I actually wrote to the editor asking for permission to do this, but didn’t receive a reply. Is there any law stopping me from passing these articles on?
In the same way that it is illegal to copy CDs, videos and the like, it is an infringement of the magazine’s intellectual copyright to photocopy, scan or re-write articles from it and send them to third parties unless you have permission to do so. In practice the magazine is unlikely to take legal action against you as long as you don’t copy very much, send your e-mails to a select few and don’t make money from your activities. If you hadn’t alerted the magazine to this practice it’s hard to see how they would have become aware of it.