Fair use and Amazon Web Services
Posted by Jeremy Voorhis Wed, 10 Aug 2005 17:55:00 GMT
One of my goals for the cokemachineglow.com is to automate the process of entering data into the music database, importing the data from an outside repository, but storing it locally, where we can maintain and edit it. I had written a prototype that did just that using the REST interface to Amazon Web Services. This was enough to convince me of the feasibility of the concept, but Amazon’s licensing agreement requires that the data link back to Amazon’s web site, and that the data is not cached for more than 24 hours, other data for a generous three months. They can’t really claim to own the tracklists for the albums we review, but the licensing agreement would seem to disallow using the data that came from their service.
I am not a lawyer, but from what research I have done on criticism and fair use, I see that there is no magic silver bullets, and fair use is a defense, not a shelter. The laws surrounding the issue seem to be intentionally vague, but from what I have read, the following principles apply:
- Take only as much as you need – don’t copy an entire work. If we were supplying a PDF of print-quality album art, I suspect this would be a problem. Of course, we do not.
- The doctrine of fair use is more sympathetic to the use of factual data as opposed to an artist’s creative work. I would like to classify album art as both creative and factual data. Anyone can see it by walking down the music aisles of Best Buy. The art is a creative work, no dobut, but it is also a piece of data that is associated with a particular album.
- Artists and record labels, especially the independents, enjoy the pub.
Taking these things into consideration, use of the artwork is most likely not an issue. Licensing agreements, however, seem to be a showstopper for automating its retrieval.
Because of Amazon’s licensing agreement for its web service, I am investigating importing artist data from the community-maintained MusicBrainz database instead. MB’s music database is very comprehensive, the non-subjective portions of it are licensed as public domain, and they expose a powerful web services API and the surprising comprehensiveness of its data. Unfortunately, they do not provide album art, but instead give references to images on amazon.com, so album art will have to be entered manually.