Copyright Continued

I have continued to follow the NZ-Libs postings on copyright along with the course readings on copyright and have come to the conclusion that it is just too complicated. Ignorance of the law is no defense but sometimes you would need to be a lawyer to be confident that what you were doing was not breaching copyright. Last year I was subscribed to the school library listserv and I remember there was a long discussion on whether displaying copies of book covers infringed copyright. Unfortunately that listserv doesn't appear to have an archive so I can't check back on the conversation bit I am sure that in the end someone (who seemed to be acknowledged as an expert in the area) said that it did breach copyright. Apparently there is separate copyright for the cover than for the book as a whole. Recently at work a staff member was scanning book covers for uploading onto our website. I asked her about the copyright issue and she wasn't aware of any problem and said that most were freely available on LibraryThing. I'm still wondering about this. When I scanned a book cover to put on my LibraryThing page I wondered if I was breaching copyright.
I think the only solution is to throw the whole thing out and start again with international experts drawing up laws that everyone can understand and agree to. Not much chance of that happening I'm afraid!