Gracenote Reponds Regarding Roxio Lawsuit

jark writes: "Gracenote has responded to the community with an 'open letter' regarding their lawsuit against Roxio and their switch to FreeDB. Seems that they wanted to completely dodge all the bullets that were shot their way rather than address the real issues at hand (such as why they think they can claim OUR inputs are THEIR intellectual propery, among others)."

Comments

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did I miss something or did he completely skip the question of _why_ they want to sue Roxio?

Missing the point?

[Craig Maloney]

OK, am I completely missing the point of this "press release"? Sure, they're suing Roxio for redirecting their product to freedb.org rather than to gracenote (or whatever the hell they are). I'm assuming that Roxio is also not paying the 0.06 "toll charge" per user to gracenote because they're not using gracenotes servers. Where was this in this in this press release? Why didn't they just come out and say "We're suing Roxio because they're using our code and not paying for it?" Instead we get this drivel about their intellectual property extending far beyond the database. Mmm Hmm... Sounds like someone is afraid that their intellectual property won't be worth the servers it's running on if others catch wind that they don't need to pay gracenote's tax.

Honestly, I think gracenote doesn't have much of a leg to stand on in this case. The real people they need to sue are the freedb.org folks and not Roxio... and honestly I don't think suing the freedb.org folks would do much good either.

I think the community at large would do better without these bozos peddling their wares.

Re:Still doesn't stand up in court

[PenguinX]

Actually I was thinking about it a little more. And Gracenote is actually breaking the law where as FreeDB is not. This is why:

Gracenote:

Believes that they "own" the content of the database, they call this "IP" (per the buzzword that everyone is using these days). However they allow the end user to use the database limitlessly as long as the client has been "approved" by Gracenote. (if free or not free etc.)

FreeDB:

Knows damn well that it doesn't own the content of the data. FreeDB believes that the data in the database is a community resource - getting to it may be slightly different as they own the equipment that the data runs on. This is entirely dependant upon the community at large.

The reason why Gracenote is probably screwing up is simple. 1) The record company, 2) artist, or 3) individual owns the IP. Not Gracenote. If 1) the record company has trademarks regarding the name of the song - they own that for a number of years. Sorry. If there is no record company, and the artist is independant then 2) the Artist owns it. Depending on both 1 and 2 it comes back to 3) the individual consumer. Simply put unless the consumer is given a liscense to sell or give away the intellectual properity they have no right to give it away to Gracenote for sale. If they DO then Gracenote *MUST* notify the consumer that this is their intent - and as such the consumer has the option not to allow this.

None of this happens with Gracenote, simply put they take and sell. This is a sad thing indeed because Gracenote doesn't have any idea of how these companies look at the IP that THEY protect. Gracenote should take precautions as not to be sued themselves.

At any rate, thought this was interesting

Still doesn't stand up in court

[PenguinX]

Essentially gracenote is suing because they are using a competing service. Regardless of if it is the same protocol or not. This won't stand up in court simply for the fact that businesses can (and do) support community services instead of a corporation. Gracenote must have learned that they have no value to add to the service, and as such they must protect it. Sadly this is not going to fly with Freedb out there. If Roxio / Adeptec wants to use a differing service - who cares? Unless Gracenote / Adeptec had some other agreement above and beyond .... there just isn't much to stand on here.

Re:Still doesn't stand up in court

[mikethegeek]

You are right about this... Any court (that has integrity) would toss this suit as inappropriate, as Roxio isn't infringing on anything Gracenote might claim as IP... Until and unless they sue FreeDB, and establish their service as illegal, any lawsuits against USERS of FreeDB (which is what Roxio is) are inappropriate and should be dismissed. Until that "fact" is established, this suit is as stupid as Pepsi suing Joe Bob's hot dog stand because he switched to Coke after his contract with Pepsi exired, because Coke chose to GIVE AWAY their product to Joe Bob to get his business. However, remember, this generation of egotistical judges (Kaplan.. cough cough) suck. So don't be shocked if...

Ignore them, they've no leg to stand on

[marxmarv]

Steve Scherf and Ti Kan created CDDB in 1995 and wrote every line of code.

See 35 USC 102(b) (emphasis mine):

A person shall be entitled to a patent unless -
(b) the invention was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country or in public use or on sale in this country, more than one year prior to the date of the application for patent in the United States

So their technique was in public use for three years prior to the filing of the patent! Stop whining about your uncompensated data entry! That's not the point of their case and it's not the point of ours. The point is that they're prosecuting a company based on a statutorily invalid patent and a disappointing business relationship, and they have neither the facts nor the law on their side.

They're absolutely right. It's not about data, it's about intellectual property. IANAL, but at least I can spot a red herring when I see one.

-jhp

Some speedy damage control here

[mav[LAG]]

Gracenote have obviously realised that this story has generated large amounts of negative press for them. So they issue what must be one of the finest pieces of damage control PR I've ever seen. It carefully emphasises what a wonderful service they have and how reasonable their charges are, given how much value they add. There is no mention - no I lie, there is one mention about how the data is user-inputted - but that's drowned in a paragraph or two of how they clean up the data and license album covers and so forth.

Although the raw data is user submitted, the storage, retrieval, categorization, and organization of the database, the access interface, and the matching and filtering methods are absolutely proprietary, and we will do what is necessary to defend this intellectual property.

Including suing someone who want to switch to a free alternative? Not mentioned.

Most of our developer partners understand our need to defray our costs, and don't demand that we provide our service for free. They also know that even if they had free access at one point in time it doesn't mean that they are guaranteed free access in perpetuity, at our expense.

But of course, if they want access to a free service without paying our expenses, then hell, we'd better get after them.

See how it works kids? Your average suit who needs to worry about business and that kind of stuff will read this excellent piece of spin-doctoring and wonder what all the hullabaloo is about. I reckon this letter cost them a fortune to draw up.

Gracenotes protecting user rights? Spyware inside!

[oolon]

Did you know the cddb protocol supports/requires the client to send your user name and host name to the server with the request?

I grabbed this from xmcd 2.6pl0

hello=oolon+sunset.ankh.org+xmcd+v2.6PL0
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.7 (compatible; xmcd 2.6PL0)
Accept: text/plain

Having found this in xmcd I thought I would check another client, and this is what grip sent before they banned it.

GET /~cddb/cddb.cgi?cmd=cddb+query+5c096c06+6+150+1270 2+50127+72362+81675+102570+2414&hello=private+free .the.cddb+Grip+2.95&proto=3
HTTP/1.1
Host: freedb.freedb.org
User-Agent: Grip/2.95
Accept: text/plain

I guess gracenotes didn't like an email address of private+free.the.cddb and of course there is grip's submission system which was how do i say ... interesting!

Modify your Winamp settings

[Strype]

As a show of support, I've modified my copy of Winamp to query freedb instead of CDDB. (I'm not sure if the Linux players query CDDB or not... haven't ventured that far into Linux yet.)

Here's how:
Open the Winamp Preferences window and look under input plug-ins for "Nullsoft CD/LineIn plug-in." Select that item and click Configure. A window will pop up entitled "CD playback settings." Change the value in the CDDB server field to read as follows:

freedb.freedb.org:8880

And of course make sure the "Use CDDB" option is checkmarked.

I encourage all Winamp users who support freedb to do this.

Sounds like a content-free non-answer...

[ncc74656]

Leaving aside for a moment the (questionable) IP claims on data that had been entered, gratis, by thousands of people around the world, there's also this consideration: What if Roxio dumped Gracenote because it had found a provider that offered a better service at a lower cost?

Consider this hypothetical situation. You go to one of the numerous electronics or computer retailers across the fruited plain and you buy a computer off the shelf. (Please...you can stop laughing now at the absurdity of this possibility.) The thing's preloaded with the latest bluescreen inducer. (We're also assuming that, for whatever reason, thinking different isn't an option.) You'd rather replace the preloaded software with something that's a little more reliable. You borrow a copy of $LINUX_DISTRO|$FREEBSD_DISTRO from a friend and blow away Win$YEAR when Billy sends some attack lawyers down from Redmond and slaps you with a lawsuit for depriving him of any future revenue when Win`expr $YEAR + 1` comes along.

How is the above hypothetical any different than what Gracenote is trying to pull off here? They seem to be under the impression that once you use their service in your software, you're stuck with them forever.

(Does anybody have a tool and/or a project (probably of a distributed nature) going to brute-force CDDB for all possible data and pass the info along to one of the free (as in speech) alternatives?)

Please answer this, Gracenote.

[(void*)]

Although the raw data is user submitted, the storage, retrieval, categorization, and organization of the database, the access interface, and the matching and filtering methods are absolutely proprietary, and we will do what is necessary to defend this intellectual property.

So you agree that you don't own the raw data? Can you give a copy of it to FreeDB?

Well, Timothy

[vergil]

" (such as why they think they can claim OUR inputs are THEIR intellectual propery, among others)." "

There is a worldwide trend of granting intellectual property protections to databases and compilations of information. This is especially prevelant in European nations, given the EU Database Directive.

For instance, check out the Terms of Use adhesion contract used by the Irish affiliate of Monster.com.

" The contents of the TMP Sites, such as text, graphics, images, logos, button icons, software and other material (collectively, "Material"), are protected under European Union, Irish and international copyright, database right, sui generis right, trademark and other intellectual property laws. Except as provided in the Agreement, all Material is the property of TMP or its content suppliers or clients. The compilation (meaning the collection, arrangement and assembly) of all content on each TMP Site (other than on Private Label pages of Monster.ie) is the exclusive property of TMP, subject to any and all intellectual property rights that Customer may have in the materials prepared and posted by Customer on a TMP Site and all other prior intellectual property rights that Customer may have, and may be protected by European Union, Irish and international copyright laws. "

Why would this be of signifcance to residents outside the EU? Well, consider the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction. The purpose of the Convention is to make foreign civil and commercial judgements recognizable and enforceable in other nations. One of the most controversial aspects of the Convention regards Intellectual Property, as different nations have different IP regimes -- like Database Protections and Sui Generis rights.

Now, if you're an American, you shouldn't have to be worried about European style Database Protections, other than considering them faraway, European oddities. Under the Hague Convention, a judgement regarding Database Protections against you held in an European court under European law can be enforced against you in America.

Hope that sheds a little light on your question.

Sincerely,
Vergil
Vergil Bushnell

Re:Their intellectual property?

[hillct]

Gracenote is claiming that the data is not the intelectual property, the DB engine, and infastructure around it is. First, I'm not sure how infastructure can be considered Intelectual Property. Second, Roxio was provided with Data under license, not the infastructure to store and deliver that data. How then can they claim that Roxio stole their Intelectual property? (Did Roxio employees walk into their data center and steal a server?).

IN all seriousness, perhaps a developer who has licensed the CDDB data can explain this to me. DO they provide as part of the license, some proprietary client or indexing algorythem to be used and embedded into the media application? If this is the case, did Roxio remove such a client, libraries, algorythem or whatever from their application when they switched vendors? Is this what they're sueing for?

Then why didn't they say that in the letter?

--CTH

--

Re:Their intellectual property?

[tb3]

I saw "Intellectual Property" in their letter, and immediately decided they were the bad guys. I've obviously been reading Slashdot too long.
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Gracenote is arguing Roxio's case for them

[President of The US]

"It's not just data, it's a service

Gracenote provides fast, accurate and secure data delivery to end-users that is available around the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to more than 25 million unique users a month. We operate redundant systems in multiple locations to provide what we feel is the best-possible user experience, and that takes bandwidth, servers, database licenses, terabytes of storage, and an expert staff to keep it all running. Additionally, we provide multiple levels of support to our developers to help them offer the best possible applications. Thousands of developers understand and appreciate the value and quality of our service, and are willing to pay our modest licensing fees to support it."

How is Roxio causing a problem here? They aren't hijacking Gracenote's servers, they are just using data from elsewhere -- and, as Gracenote says it's not about the data. And all they are saying after that is that they give great service for their licensing fees. So? Just because they do a great job, everyone should be forced to use their service?
-----------------------

An Open Letter to David Hyman

[President of The US]

To: dhyman@gracenote.com
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 7:37 PM
Subject: About Suing Roxio

Dear Mr. Hyman -

I read your open letter regarding the lawsuit against Roxio, and I would like you to know that I am sad to see how you are digging in your heels over this.

The fact is, regardless of however much code Gracenote has developed, that the data was provided to CDDB by end-users who, for the most part, were contributing to other end-users. If CDDB had said, "help us build our database so we can get big enough to stop anyone else from doing it," you would have never ended up where you are now.

I do not dispute that you have every right to ask that developers who build connectivity to your servers be asked to pay a fee. What I do dispute is your right to try to force, by abuse of the law, anyone who would dare choose to not use your service to have no choice. And you may not realize this, but in the end, your war is against the users, those whom you are trying to deprive any choice in cd-databases.

Your behavior on this matter is wrong. Why is it that you do not respect the right of others to compete with you? Just because they are offering a free service does not mean that they have done something wrong. In your letter, you state that you provide quality service. I do not doubt that. If you are that much better than freedb, then you have nothing to fear.

I will switch my CD-ripping software to connect to freedb, and encourage everyone I know to do the same. Please discontinue this lawsuit. Give users a choice.

Thank you
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