Cover thumbnail rights rationale

This is the standing rationale referenced by permission_documentation_url in bibliography.csv. It is a record of a considered position, not a license and not legal advice.

Position

Cover art for the magazines and anthologies listed in this bibliography is copyrighted, in nearly every case by the cover artist, and licensed to the publisher for that issue or edition. No public license exists for these images and none is claimed here.

This site displays them as small thumbnails, with artist credit and a link to the publication, as illustration of a factual bibliographic record of where the author’s fiction has appeared. That use is asserted as fair use.

Why the four factors are believed to favor this use

1. Purpose and character. Factual and bibliographic. The thumbnail identifies the specific issue a story appeared in, alongside credit and a link back to the publisher. It is not decorative and not a showcase of the art for its own sake. The use is promotional toward the publisher rather than competitive with it.
2. Nature of the work. Creative, which cuts against the use. Acknowledged.
3. Amount used. The whole cover, because a partial cover does not identify an issue — but at thumbnail resolution only, too small to substitute for the art or to reproduce at print quality.
4. Market effect. No substitution. Nobody acquires a cover illustration, a print, or a back issue in place of buying one because of a thumbnail on an author’s bibliography page. The link to the publisher points the other way.

The relevant custom also matters: author bibliography pages showing covers of publications containing their work are near-universal practice in this field, and publishers generally regard it as promotion.

Operating rules

• Thumbnails only. Cap the long edge at ~400px and do not link through to a full-resolution file.
• Always credit the cover artist by name, adjacent to the image.
• Always link the thumbnail or its caption to the publisher or the publication’s own page.
• Host the images on this site. Do not hotlink ISFDB or any ISFDB mirror: those scans are posted under ISFDB’s own fair-use rationale for bibliographic purposes, convey no rights onward, and the mirror’s URLs are not stable.
• Re-source images from the publisher where possible rather than from a mirror’s scan.
• No cover is displayed unless the artist is credited. A cover with no attribution available is held back rather than shown uncredited.
• Honor any takedown or objection immediately and without argument, and record it in permission_notes for that row.

Held back

Covers not displayed under this rationale, and why:

• No artist attribution available. Cannot meet the credit rule above.
• No cover image located. A data gap rather than a rights question; these become displayable if an image is sourced and the artist is credited.
• Stock-agency art. Credited to a stock library rather than an artist. The publisher licensed it for the cover; that license does not extend here, and the credit rule cannot be satisfied in the usual way. Held back pending a direct ask to the publisher.
• No cover art exists. Some venues, podcasts especially, have no per-issue cover to display. Recorded as not_applicable: closed, not outstanding.
• Passed over by choice. A cover that could have been displayed but was not. Also not_applicable, so it does not linger in the worklist as though it were an unresolved sourcing gap.

A typographic cover with no illustration is still credited, to its designer.

If this needs to be firmer

Permissions are worth collecting opportunistically, and are concentrated: Dell Magazines covers Asimov’s and Analog, Neil Clarke covers Clarkesworld and Forever, and a handful of artists account for a large share of the rest. A granted permission upgrades a row to license_status=permission_granted with the evidence recorded; it does not change the rationale for the remainder.