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

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On 10/12/07, Kuno Woudt <kuno at frob.nl> wrote:
> No, not a reliability issue.  A social issue, how does musicbrainz
> appear to new musicbrainz users and potential musicbrainz customers?

That's good, then at least the issues are clear. Not legal, not a
question of whether or we can use archive.org this way, but just the
issues that have been raised by Chris (and others, I assume).

About those issues, I agree that it would be a majorly bad idea to
make enemies of other communities by using their resources without as
much as a nod. As far as discogs go, we could send them a polite
question asking if we use their covers in this way given that we also
add a discogs url link. If they don't want to allow that we will
simply add it in big red colors to CoverArtSites and move on.

The guidlines which I would prefer go something like this:
1. anything that is legal is permitted unless it is explicitly
disallowed (by the below rules or per the wish of the specific site
operator)
2. when adding a larger amount of covers from a single site, ask for
permission from the site operator (even if the site does not hold any
relevant copyrights) and put the result for everyone to see in
CoverArtSites

I also think we should discourage use of cover art from cover art
search engines such as cdcovers.cc. Distributing those 300 dpi covers
are hardly covered by any fair use doctrine, and even if we could get
archive.org to do it for us we really don't want to get "tainted".
Also, those sites rely on clicks for money and aren't unlikely to blow
100's of our linked covers by changing their robots.txt.

Could there be a middle ground where we can all agree on something
(not necessarily the above)?

Philip