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

[Kuno Woudt]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 12:31:27AM +0800, Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
> 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 you rely on the fair use doctrine, you probably have to make sure 
all servers are in the US.  It looks like we currently have a mirror 
server in the UK, ( http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MirrorServer ).

But even then, I think fair use is not very well defined, and I would
prefer it if musicbrainz did not rely on it at all.  Getting sued is
expensive, let's avoid that if we can :)

> >> 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.

Hm, from my understanding of copyright law the resulting page on
musicbrainz would be a derived work of the original cover art.  For
copyright law, it doesn't really matter on which server any of the bits
are stored.  I'll have to ask ruaok on what grounds the lawyers decided
to allow archive.org, because it seems like shady business to me :).

> 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).

That the risk of 'getting caught' is very low is not a valid argument
for breaking the law IMO.

-- kuno.