Announcing the Cover Art Archive | Hacker News Reader

Announcing the Cover Art Archive

blog.musicbrainz.org

55 pointsocharles9 comments

Perhaps someone more experienced can enlighten me; does this really constitute fair use under US copyright law?

Also, even if it meets the requirements for fair use in the US, is this project not still wide open to copyright infringement claims from abroad?

As far as I'm aware there are no fair use (or 'fair dealing' as it is here) provisions in the UK that permit the archiving and distribution of copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright holder.

The CAA is hosted and managed by archive.org; it is reasonable to expect that their lawyers greenlighted the project before hosting it. And for complains they already have a system in place to manage all the DMCA requests that they receive daily.

The article mentions Amazon, though last.fm also has this functionality on their API which I've used on a personal project before. I've not really found albums it doesn't have an image for[1]. For last.fm you have to apply for commercial use.

Does anyone know what the licensing will be here? I'm unsure from reading the article.

[1] http://martinw.net/PutYourMoneyWhereYourEarsAre/

When I try that link, I get "The test API key has been deprecated. To use the Last.fm API you'll need to get an API account."

And believe me, lots of the albums that I have do not have covers on last.fm. Nor Amazon, for that matter -- and Amazon has had a bad habit of guessing very wrongly at cover art for some of them. It's bad enough I've started adding cover art on my own just to keep Amazon from making albums look ridiculous when I download them to my phone...

Whoops sorry about that, must have the wrong API key, I'll get that fixed. (EDIT: now fixed)

Well last.fm is user-uploaded content too, I'm unsure how the MB archive will be superior to their collection.

I checked out Musicbrainz for a project recently, but found it to be lacking in a couple of areas.

Is anyone aware of a service that provides music metadata for tracks & artists with an support for an autocomplete API call, as well as artist thumbnails? I'm using Last.FM to get by as of now, but there are a couple of issues with that too.

MusicBrainz would be really happy to help try and provide the information you want. You should open a ticket at our bug tracker and we'll see what can be done. I might be biased, but I don't think you'll find cleaner metadata information on the interwebs :)

We do, but it's not yet released. If you'd be up for it, I'd love some feedback. Hit me up at cnunciato@rhapsody.com.

http://developer.rovicorp.com/docs does some of this stuff, albeit it's a bit cumbersome. I'm still using them since they have some metadata available which is unique.

(these are the guys behind http://www.allmusic.com)

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