[mb-users] Using archive.org for cover art

[Kuno Woudt]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 09:32:57PM +0800, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
> In the edit note I linked to it was claimed that there were legal
> issues, which I would very much like to know about if they actually
> exist.

In the edit note you linked to the cover art is not obviously under
public domain or some liberal license.  So, there are copyright issues.
There is a statement on the CoverArt page claiming copyright doesn't
apply to musicbrainz in these cases.  In itself, that is not yet enough
reassurance for some users, there needs to be some better worked out
policies regarding cover art, and possibly some rules users of the site
have to follow (terms of service) with regards to linking to 
copyrighted works.  Also, I believe musicbrainz currently has a mirror
in the UK, so the parts mirrored will also have to abide by UK copyright 
laws, not just those which apply to servers in the US.  Not having this
thought out properly will also limit where musicbrainz can host mirrors
if we need/want those at some point.

> About the social issues, I think that discussion is very much worth
> having. When I have linked a large number of covers from a single site
> I have contacted those sites and gotten permission (listed as Lokpest
> and Cakegraphy on the wiki page). What else do you consider to be best
> practices? Or to phrase it differently, what are bad practices which
> you think we should refrain from?

The legal issues are not specific to archive.org.  But there is a social
issue which I think is specific to archive.org.  Even if we have
permission under copyright to embed an image on one of our pages, we
don't always get permission to link to it from the site owners.  When
we don't, we can use the 'cached' image on archive.org instead.  To many
users, this seems like a sleazy thing to do, we're using someone else
bandwidth without paying for it -- even though we have permission from
the archive.org folks to do so, it just doesn't seem right to many
users.  

The 'please hold' comment by mo is what I would ask of you too.  Rob is 
aware of the issue(s) and will look at it soon after the next server 
release (which was supposed to be yesterday, but will be done today if
i'm not mistaken).  

-- kuno.