Copyright and DMCA Compliance

This page has not been reviewed by our documentation team (more info).

Legal information about MusicBrainz

This page contains important information about the legal aspects of MusicBrainz. Before reporting a copyright infringement on musicbrainz.org, please read this page carefully!

What is MusicBrainz?

  • MusicBrainz is a database/encyclopedia of music metadata. Music metadata at its very core is information about the music, like Artists, their Releases and the Recordings released by these Artists. MusicBrainz aims to create a historical record of all music for all people to use.
  • You could consider MusicBrainz as being the equivalent to the online catalog of a library, rather than being the library itself – MusicBrainz knows a lot about music, but MusicBrainz does not have access to the music itself, nor does it make any music available to anyone.
  • MusicBrainz can be considered the IMDB of music. You cannot download movies from IMDB, nor can you download music from MusicBrainz.

What MusicBrainz is NOT?

  • MusicBrainz is NOT a music download/streaming service. You cannot download music or other copyrighted material from MusicBrainz or any other MetaBrainz website.
  • MusicBrainz is not a repository of authoritative copyright information. While MusicBrainz has some copyright information, it is limited to what is printed on the distribution media (such as the back of an audio CD) and any copyright information is almost certainly out of date.
  • MusicBrainz is not a CD distribution site. Unless we have links in a specific page that indicate where that specific product can be purchased, we do not know where to purchase any the music that is in our catalog.
  • MusicBrainz also does not know how to contact any of the artists nor labels in our database – if you are trying to contact somebody, you can try to find them yourself using the information (links to home pages, social media, etc.) that is available in MusicBrainz. Sorry, but there's nothing else we can do to help you with this.

Image Archives

The MusicBrainz community curates Internet Archive collections that contain covers for music releases and graphics for music events. None of these images reside on MusicBrainz servers and are all served from Internet Archive servers. MusicBrainz displays images that are loaded from Internet Archive servers (via deep linking) directly.

MusicBrainz also supports crediting the authors of art images for releases and for events as much as possible.

Should you object to the use of your copyrighted art images, please ask to have them removed by mailing info@archive.org and request that the image be removed from the Internet Archive.

DMCA Notices of Copyright Violation

If you still believe that we violate your copyright, you must include a link to the infringing material, specifically where copyrighted media can be downloaded. Simply providing a link to a release page on MusicBrainz does not suffice as proof; you need to provide an actual link to infringing material. Without a link to the infringing material, we will simply reject your DMCA takedown request as invalid.

If you have found infringing material on MusicBrainz, or any of our other sites, you can mail your DMCA takedown request to copyright@metabrainz.org , but make sure to include the link the infringing material, or your request will be rejected.

Licensing MusicBrainz Data

Should you be interested in using our data for your project, whether it is for commercial or simply personal use, please see our data license page.

MetaBrainz also offers other datasets for download from sister projects like ListenBrainz and CritiqueBrainz. To find out more, please visit our datasets page.

This page is transcluded from Copyright and DMCA Compliance.