History
The first issue of National Geographic Magazine was published in October 1888, just nine months after the Society itself was founded. The hallmark of National Geographic, reinventing it from a text-oriented entity closer to a scientific journal, to a magazine famous for exclusive pictorial footage, was its January 1905 publication of several full-page pictures made in Tibet in 1900–1901 by two explorers from the Russian Empire, Gombojab Tsybikov and Ovshe Norzunov. The June 1985 cover portrait of 13-year-old Afghan girl Sharbat Gula became one of the magazine's most recognizable images.
In the late 1990s and 2000s, prolonged litigation over copyright of the magazine as a collective work in Greenberg v. National Geographic and other cases caused National Geographic to withdraw from the market The Complete National Geographic, a digital compilation of all its past issues of the magazine. Two different federal appellate courts have now ruled in National Geographic's favor in permitting an electronic reproduction of the paper magazine and the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in December 2008. In July 2009 National Geographic announced a new version of The Complete National Geographic, containing all issues of the magazine from 1888 through December 2008. An updated version was released the next year, adding the issues from 2009; these issues are also available on a separate disc for owners of the original version. Updates for subsequent years of the magazine's archive are scheduled to be made available on an annual basis. More recently, the archive, along with the digital edition of the Magazine, is available online to subscribers of the Magazine.
In 2006, National Geographic writer Paul Salopek was arrested and charged with espionage, entering Sudan without a visa, and other crimes by the government of Sudan while on assignment for a feature article. After National Geographic and the Chicago Tribune, for whom Salopek also wrote, mounted a legal defense and led an international appeal to Sudan, he was eventually released.
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