I’ve worked in the OpenStreetMap community for a while, and they are very careful of copyright infringement within their maps, so I always make sure that I’m not infringing on copyright.
I have noticed in BookBrainz, however, that Amazon is able to be freely used for its data. Is all of Amazon’s book data free to copy? Am I free to copy from any other online book repository, like LibraryThing?
as far as I know, there’s no issue using data from other sources in BookBrainz (speaking as primarily a MusicBrainz editor myself), in fact I believe it’s encouraged
Hi @Infinite_Bed, it depends on what type of data we are talking about, but generally any fact-based metadata is not copyrightable in any way.
So any titles, author, publication information, table of contents, physical description, etc. are all fair game.
However any content such as synopsis, reviews or other similar textual content should not be added to BookBrainz as it is copyrightable.
Hope that clarifies your doubts a bit!
We are a database for metadata, which is not copyrightable by definition, so this is not really a worry.
You are free to copy in the sense that you’re not infringing on anyone’s copyright. But the point of the DB is to have accurate information, so I would suggest you don’t copy any information you can’t confirm is correct.
Thank you all for the help! Its good to know what I can and can’t copy, it will make things a lot easier.