[Web4lib] Copyright and Book cover images

[Andrew Nagy]

Will, Amazon offers their book images for free as well as other data 
such as the book reviews, etc. through their AWS service.  The main 
caveat to this is you must include a link back to the item on amazon's 
website for the use of the images.  Also, you cannot save the images 
locally, you can only link to the images.  This is all illustrated in 
the AWS liscence.

http://www.amazon.com/AWS-License-home-page-Money/b/ref=sc_fe_c_2_3434651_2/103-7301321-8648667?ie=UTF8&node=3440661&no=3434651&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA


Will Kurt wrote:
> I have a question that I've been curious about for awhile, but haven't 
> been able to find an answer to.  What are the copyright issues 
> regarding the use of book cover images, especially ones from Amazon?
>
> I've noticed a lot of websites (LibraryThing for example) will pull 
> images from Amazon, often directly linking to the image hosted on 
> Amazon's server.  For obvious reasons using images of book covers can 
> be very useful but I was always unclear of the legal/ethical issues 
> surrounding this?  If I want to add images of book covers to my 
> library website or OPAC is it okay to use Amazon's image covers, if 
> so, is it actually preferable to link directly to the Amazon image or 
> would it be better to host it locally? Normally I would assume hosting 
> it locally would be better due to bandwidth issues, but so many people 
> take the images hosted by Amazon I was wondering if perhaps they 
> preferred this?
>
> Or do sites like LibraryThing pay a licensing fee to Amazon or 
> something similar?
>
> Are there other routes to obtaining images?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Will
>
> ____________
> Will Kurt
> Research Librarian
> BBN Technologies
> 617-873-8019
> wkurt at bbn.com
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