Dofis

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The Beatles cover

I think we should discuss the addition of the pseudo-cover of The Beatles to those songs. I have three objections:

1. Consistency: other songs that were not released as singles do not show covers; singles show single covers, not the album cover if they happened to be released as a single and on an album
2. Reality: the free-use version of the cover is not the actual cover. It's a simulation and it's not accurate. It could be made more accurate, but if so, we bump into objection number three.
3. Copyright: if the simulated image is (or is changed to be) accurate enough to use as a substitute, then it's also close enough that it impinges the copyright and we need to write a fair use rationale. Such a rationale is unlikely to get past the people enforce the policy and the images will be removed.

— John Cardinal (talk) 12:27, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Ok. I guess I should have brought it up on some sort of discussion page. Never thought about the singles thing. I can go through and remove the covers if you think it the best thing to do. Is there anyway we can get the real singles covers up without violating any copyright laws? It would be nice to have a visual. I haven't done a lot of editing on Wikipedia, thanks for letting me know I was doing something wrong. (Dofis (talk) 05:25, 27 November 2009 (UTC))

It's OK that you changed the articles without bringing it up on a discussion page. You didn't know it was controversial. In general, Wikipedia (WP) wants editors to be bold and change articles to improve them.

Using album and single covers is a hotly debated topic on WP because the images are subject to copyright. "Fair use" exceptions allow limited use of those images without paying a fee, but the WP lawyers have interpreted the fair-use rules pretty strictly. For an image to appear on a page, there must be an article-specific rationale for why the image qualifies for "fair use" in that article. It's easy to write a fair-use rationale (FUR) for album covers on an album article or single covers on a single article, but beyond that, things get sticky. In the case of songs that were not issued as singles, and that includes most of the songs on The Beatles, you can't use the copyrighted image of the album cover. The simulated image that someone made to try and get around that restriction is subject to the issues I listed above.

In the end, I think it's a sad fact that we can't use the album cover (or a simulation) on the song articles. It's frustrating because so many other web sites use the album covers. Retailers like Amazon.com have permission to do so, but most if not all of the fan sites are violating copyright law, and WP can't do that. I'll revert your additions unless you beat me to it. — John Cardinal (talk) 14:46, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

The/the Beatles

Yes folks, it's here again. Please look at this link [1] and leave your vote. I thank you.--andreasegde (talk) 08:07, 1 February 2011 (UTC)