Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

Is is acceptable to use an author photo from Amazon for a Goodreads author page? I didn't think there would be a copyright issue from one site to the next considering we can use cover images, etc., but perhaps I was wrong.

These are the rules of copyright for Goodreads:

Copyright is important!
So before you upload an image, make sure that either:

You own the rights to the image (usually meaning that you created the image yourself)
You can prove that the copyright holder has licensed the image under a free license
You can prove that the image is in the public domain
You believe, and state, a fair use rationale for the specific use of the image that you intend


As the author photos that are displayed on Amazon are sourced from the authors that implies that they are NOT public domain.

Therefore no, you can't use a photo from Amazon. You could approach the author to get permission to use the photo and therefore the email etc would be your proof.

Sandra wrote: "These are the rules of copyright for Goodreads:

Copyright is important!
So before you upload an image, make sure that either:

You own the rights to the image (usually meaning that you created th..."

Yes, thanks, I've read the rules of copyright many times; my question was just whether or not they were usable under those rules. Since Amazon owns Goodreads, I thought it may be acceptable.

I'm not interested as going so far as emailing an author; I was only interested in knowing if it was usable if someone requested me to upload it.

No worries Cassandra, just putting it out there for others that might read this :)

Sandra wrote: "No worries Cassandra, just putting it out there for others that might read this :)"

Thanks, Sandra :)

You can prove that the image is in the public domain

Is it acceptable to use an author photo from
A:publisher's official site
example: http://author.crown.com.tw/wenyong/
B:author's official site?
example: http://www.jimmyspa.com/
C:personal facebook page?
example: https://www.facebook.com/pg/houwenyon...
*This official facebook fan page is operated by 侯文詠 himself personally.

If those source can't be used, would someone explain what is public domain??

None of the sources you mentioned is the in public domain. You can read about it in Wikipedia.

I'm not a lawyer, but decent guidelines are that something is in the public domain if one of the following is true:
* The author has been dead for more than 100 years (well, 70 years in most of the world, but not in Mexico for instance)
* The author has released it into the public domain
* There is some specific rule saying it is in the public domain (e.g. works by the US government)

A summary of rules by territory can be found here.

In this case, it probably has nothing to do with the author. Instead, it is whether or not someone owns the copyright to the photo. The presence of a photo on a website doesn't indicate whether or not there is an existing copyright, but you should assume there is unless there is a statement to the contrary.

Why do the rules differ between covers and photos of people: Because of what Elizabeth said. The publisher of a book is by definition the rights holder for the cover image of said book, and they're the one providing it to Amazon (and by extension, us). The author may not actually own the copyright of their bio photo.

In general (this is really complicated though, and differs all over the world, and between US states), photographers own the copyright of a photo, not the person in it.

And before someone brings it up (because someone always does), no we can't just use them anyway under the fair use doctrine. Fair Use applies to non-commercial usage. GR is a commercial site.

* There are commercial exceptions under which fair use applies to commercial use too. None of those exceptions apply to GR either.