[mb-users] Adding links to your own cover scans?

[Philip Jägenstedt]

Hi!

> No, this is not the same. The English Wikipedia can use them because of the Fair Use law in America - the German Wikipedia for example is not allowed to use them and MB isn't as well. AFAIK the reason MB is allowed to display the Amazon ones is because it provides a link to where you can buy the CDs from them.

Where is the MusicBrainz server? If it is in the US, then a fair use
case could be argued for MB as well, it is a sort of a music
dictionary... maybe. Be that as it be, no covers are going to be
stored on the MB servers.

>> If I have a cover but it doesn't exist on any public website, would it
>> be ok to put it on a webserver of my own, throw archive.org at it and
>> submit it to MusicBrainz? I know that I would  be commiting a crime
>> (in some territories), but I don't think archive.org would and
>> MusicBrainz certainly wouldn't.
> From what it says on the wiki page this seems ok - your risk then. :)

The wikipage isn't an official guideline yet is it? I'm bringing up
the question because I think that parts of it maybe haven't been
completely worked out. Just throwing archive.org in front of any cover
site stirred up some emotions in the wiki anyway...

> I don't think any lawyer cares about your purity of motives. ;)

The lawyers of the artists in question are either nonexistant or in
China, where they plenty other things to worry about, I'm not in the
least concerned :) If these things don't get archived somewhere they
will disappear forever, which would be bad. In that way archive.org is
great, eternal storage for anything that has fallen out of the lawyers
memories (i.e. anything commercially irrelevant, which would be 99% of
all music released).

Philip