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Should freedb's Data Be Public Domain?
Horar asks: "There's been a lot of recent fuss over freedb. My position is that freedb was just not free enough, and I would like to find a way to bring all the data into the public domain, just as MusicBrainz has done with much of their data. I had not thought that this would be possible until I received advice from various parties suggesting that it was. So now I ask Slashdot if this is true? Can the freedb data legally be brought into the public domain at this time, and if so how? Most importantly, would it be 'The Right Thing To Do'?"
Good Idea: asking a lawyer for legal advice /. for legal advice
Bad Idea: asking
Philosophy.
Here's the wikipedia link..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedb
Well; Open is sometimes painful. But so is life..
Get over it. Open it up. :),
Make the world better. Quit hating.
FWIW, my position is that I felt really F'd over, years ago when CDDB decided to start selling the info I had helped them collect. I thought the whole idea of FreeDB was to correct the mistakes of the past so that this could never be done again.
So yeah, I think this data should be public domain, and I'm not entirely convinced that databases-- collections of facts-- should be able to be protected as intellectual property at all.
The RIAA will soon assert that the information is their IP and therefore using FreeDB will give them all the information they need to sue you.
And in this country you can sue anyone for anything, provided you can pay for your lawyers' fees. In the RIAA's case, they're betting (usually correctly, by making sure they sue people who can't afford to defend themselves) that you can't, and therefore will have to do whatever they demand.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Note: I am most certainly not a lawyer.
freedb.org claims the data is licensed under the GPL; therefore, you should have the right to distribute it as you see fit, provided you comply with the GPL.
As far as whether you can free it from the GPL, I believe the answer is no. While the data is arguably merely facts, and therefore not protected by copyright law, I think there was a copyright amendment recently that made a particular compilation of data subject to copyright. I don't know whether it passed or not.
Here's the Slashdot article on the subject. Unfortunately, TFA it links to is gone.
Why though? I understand your just pointing out a different perspective, but no one will see that perpective unless you give reasoning. I can't really think of a reason to let it die other than it taking up time.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
If you "place" it into the Public Domain, no one may control it. This means a proprietary program may use it and extended it, and restrict it use like cddb.com !!! See wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/....
Just this time, however, I've saved you the trouble:
Yeah. There was a guy who used to hang out on rec.aviation.military that wrote just like you. We couldn't understand him either.
They supply copies of their databases via BitTorrent - http://tracker.freedb.org/
(which arguably is more valuable than the server side software).
Sometimes nouns, even proper nouns, get verbed. Sometimes this can cause confusion, since verbing weirds language.
Merriam-Webster is adding the verb "to google" to their dictionary in the next release.
0 06/07/03/daily36.html
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2
There is a link on freedb.org under the downloads section to download the database and the server side software. According to Wikipedia article linked to by a previous poster, it under the GPL. I don't know if you can bring into the public domain, but another service could certainly make use of it if they wanted to.
First, it looks like the database files are already GPL'd. I'm not sure what you would want to do with the data that isn't allowed by the GPL.
Second, if you want to do something with the database that isn't allowed by the GPL (however the GPL applies to databases), you might want to ask your lawyer whether the freedb database files contain any copyrightable expression, given that the titles themselves are not copyrightable and much of their arrangement may be functional. I haven't looked closely at the files, but it would be worth investigating if for some reason you really wanted to make a derivative work of the database files without GPLing the result.
IAAL, but this is definitely not legal advice.
Considering the poor state of many of the Freedb entries, is that data really useful? I've been volunteering with the MusicBrainz project since October and I've found the data at Freedb to be a complete mess. MusicBrainz users can use Freedb to import albums so that we don't have to re-enter things into MusicBrainz by hand, but with so many duplicate and poorly edited entries (typos, etc) I'm wondering if it's worth it to even keep the data.
MusicBrainz is a better designed system. It's not limited to the archaic interface and design of the old CDDB system. It has interfaces that programmers can use to retrieve the same kind of data that they get from Freedb. The site also has a system in place for editing of entries and peer review of changes. I think it's a better solution, although I'm biased because of my involvement and interest with the project.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Since Slashdot users aren't lawyers, here are some selected sections from Feist, the most prominent on-topic case on this issue, decided by the Supreme Court holding that telephone book was not copyrightable. The CDDB and FreeDB databases are very similar to the telephone books in Feist: a compilation of facts, no selection criteria (anything they get, they put in, it's not a database of someone's subjective evaluation of the best CDs), no originality in arrangement.
The more interesting issue is to what extent contracts can modify the background rules of copyright and allow someone to exert copyright-like control over non-copyrightable works. See ProCD. Since the GPL purports to be a license, rather than a contract, it is only enforceable if the underlying work is copyrightable.
FEIST PUBLICATIONS, INC. v. RURAL TELEPHONE SERVICE CO., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)
[11] Originality is a constitutional requirement. The source of Congress' power to enact copyright laws is Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution, which authorizes Congress to "secure for limited Times to Authors . . . the exclusive Right to their respective Writings." In two decisions from the late 19th Century -- The Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82 (1879); and Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884) -- this Court defined the crucial terms "authors" and "writings." In so doing, the Court made it unmistakably clear that these terms presuppose a degree of originality.
[16]Factual compilations, on the other hand, may possess the requisite originality. The compilation author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the collected data so that they may be used effectively by readers. These choices as to selection and arrangement, so long as they are made independently by the compiler and entail a minimal degree of creativity, are sufficiently original that Congress may protect such compilations through the copyright laws. Nimmer 2.11[D], 3.03; Denicola 523, n. 38. Thus, even a directory that contains absolutely no protectible written expression, only facts, meets the constitutional minimum for copyright protection if it features an original selection or arrangement.
[17] This protection is subject to an important limitation. The mere fact that a work is copyrighted does not mean that every element of the work may be protected. Originality remains the sine qua non of copyright; accordingly, copyright protection may extend only to those components of a work that are original to the author. Patterson & Joyce 800-802; Ginsburg, Creation and Commercial Value: Copyright Protection of Works of Information, 90 Colum. L. Rev. 1865, 1868, and n. 12 (1990) (hereinafter Ginsburg). Thus, if the compilation author clothes facts with an original collocation of words, he or she may be able to claim a copyright in this written expression. Others may copy the underlying facts from the publication, but not the precise words used to present them. In Harper & Row, for example, we explained that President Ford could not prevent others from copying bare historical facts from his autobiography, see 471 U.S., at 556-557, but that he could prevent others from copying his "subjective descriptions and portraits of public figures." [p*349] Id., at 563. Where the compilation author adds no written expression but rather lets the facts speak for themselves, the expressive element is more elusive. The only conceivable expression is the manner in which the compiler has selected and arranged the facts. Thus, if the selection and arrangement are original, these elements of the work are eligible for copyright protection. See Patry, Copyright in Compilations of Facts (or Why the "White Pages" Are Not Copyrightable), 12 Com. & Law 37, 64 (Dec. 1990) (hereinafter Patry). No matter how original the format, however, the facts themselves do not become original through association. See Patterson & Joyce 776.
[18] This inevitably means that the copyri
Wikipedia needs a database of stuff like that. Wikipedia is full of album and artist articles, but they're not organized in a useful way.
This is an interesting article about the NFL and the collection of facts known as sports scores. It seems appropriate to the topic.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, Meme Borks You!
blah blah not cap stuff lameness filter sucks.
n/t
Hey parent, it would appear that yet another retarded moderator wandered by and in addition to inappropriately applying a mod point, wasted one!
I hope they enjoyed that. What a gas.
Man AC, you're a complete genius sometimes!
i see this issue in the context of the following metaphor:
consider a pacifist living in a time of murder and chaos. this pacifist has two choices: (1) emerge outside without any weapons, and hope that his example will protect him from evil (2) emerge outside with a non-lethal weapon, and hope the weapon will protect him from evil.
choice (1) is simpler and idealistically cleaner. this pacifist realizes the vulnerability of his person, but sacrifices it for the absoluteness of the cause. it echoes the example that history teaches us (reaffirmed recently in the non-aggressive resistance of gandhi, martin luther king, walsea, etc.). it is the more pure approach, and almost mathematic in its logic.
choice (2) is contradictory -- even hypocritical. this pacifist fights the enemy but must do so with some of his devices (and, ironically, deliberately lesser versions of it). his approach calls to mind no laudable, recommended examples. it has no basis in any absolute or ideal principles, and is as logical as politics and compromise
choice (1) is the public domain. it does not believe in copyright, so it forswears all claim to it. it recognizes potential for closed-source/proprietary abuse, but it selflessly takes no action against it.
choice (2) is the gpl. it also does not believe in copyright, but uses copyright as a weapon against it. it allows no potential for closed-source/proprietary abuse, and fights to keep itself free.
now for the rub. i personally choose the gpl. to return to the metaphor, this is a time of murder and chaos. much like criminals and murderers, so too do self-serving companies and developers prowl for works that have value and are cheaply exploitable. releasing a work to the public domain would be like sending it out into the wild, naked and defenseless -- at the mercy of any to exploit it. i cannot practice a pacifism that will not resist the violent while they do as they please -- no matter how theoretically pure this principle may be. at least with the gpl, i make it just a little bit harder for the others to create their closed-private-copyrighted works.
anyway, this is a metaphor. as warned about it may be contrived and empty. but it makes sense to me.
this post published under the "free art license". (no public domain for you!)
Please note that Horar (the submitter) is the one who effectivly let freedb.org die. He worked with them for two years but didn't release any useful code. Now he is activly promoting his own project freedb2.org, promising to release the source but it is still not available.
I wonder why he should care about the data not being public domain, if his software is to be supposed GPL licensed? Unless well... think for your self.
I can't belive he just got more advertising on slashdot.
Need a Wiki? Check out DokuWiki
nt
Well, it depends on who did what and why.
IANAL, so I can't comment on the legal aspect of it. Besides legal doesn't always mean "right". Current laws are favour big companies and vested interests, especially when it concerns music related stuff.
There are several aspects: the domain, the hosting, the software and the data.
The domain belongs to the individual that first registered it.
The software belongs to the people that wrote it, or paid for it to be written.
The hosting is... well whoever pays for it or grants it.
The data is the tricky point.
Essentially it is metadata, album and track names etc. This data is essentially a description of the music and the delivery method. Unless you use somebody else's copyrighted format, nobody actually owns this data, or otherwise said, everybody owns it.
The database itself is a collection of the data. The person that created that collection should be the one that owns it, unless specific other agreements have been made. In this case, the general public entered the data. I havn't looked everywhere on the freedb site, but I didn't find anything that said "all data entered belongs to me, so enter it at your own risk". Therefore, the general public should own the data. It should therefore be "free".
That leaves the issue of how to present that free data. Packaging and delivery of the data involves costs. The general public doesn't have the right to expect the current holder of the data to make it available for free. As far as I can see, there is no "right thing" solution to this problem, except that if you want the data, you reimburse the current holder for the costs involved.
Legal issues aside, that seems the be the situation. Anybody see anything wrong in that logic?
You are totally right. He's clearly managed to destroy cooperation within FreeDB, set the contributors against each other, and now it looks like he's planning to rip off the whole contribution. Something has to be done to stop it. I've contributed to FreeDB; My entries involved careful choice and selection of how to lay out and present the titles. I believe that they are copyright protectable and they were put in purely on the GPL License.
Further, I believe that the heavy level of mistakes and different representations of the same data in the FreeDB database actually helps us in this case. It's clearly an original work and not just a factual representation.
I'd like to get a group of people in a similar situation together to put up a class action suit against Horar. The primary aim will be to restrain him from further license infringement, but I'll put any money recovered from damages awarded towards
We'd need
* some money
* a lawyer
* a good place to organise.
To begin with, we'd try to get him to settle out of court; something like
* ceases to work on FreeDB2 or any related projects
* pays some compensation to the FreeDB project people
But we would have to be willing to go the whole way. Who would be up for joining? Can anyone set up a site for this. It would be a good chance to test the limits of copyright and also to set an example of GPL enforcement.
1. Get an agreement to write code for freedb
2. Don't release the source code
3. Let the admins of freedb quit
4. Make the freedb contents public domain
5. Incoperate the public domain code in a new (closed) solution
6. ?????
7. Profit!
I'm certain, in the US, at least, there was a case that set a precedent on this sort of data collection. Not long after the man who made the first telephone directory did so (yes he had to call *everyone* to get it), a second lazier man made his own, copying the numbers from the first directory. The first man accused the second of this, taking his ass to court on copyright infringement. The verdict: The court ruled you couldn't own the truth, the information had always existed. The first man had collected it, but he hadn't *created* it, so he couldn't enforce copyright. Copyright applies to works of art, not to facts. . The source of information was irrelevant, if you ignore typesetting etc..
No-one does own the data on freedb. Sure it's now avaliable through many sources, freedb, cddb, Wikipedia, but most importantly it's on the CD. When a CD is released, that data is made public. It doesn't hold significance, it's for reference. freedb don't own it, nor do the record companies. 'Public domain' doesn't even apply, it's not a work of art under threat of imitation. just another catalogue of factual data, like a reference of the colours of common objects. And the truth is everyone's.
Well, that looks quite plausible to me, as rec.aviation.military has jus about as much in common with the gnu libc faq and the MicroVAX FAQ combined as this discussion about freedb data.
You realize that just because something is not be subject to copyright, that doesn't mean it has to be made public :)
:)
public domain and publisized are two diffrent things, or do you really think that reserving rights helps when CC-numbers leak out
FRA: STFU GTFO
The point is moot. There's not a damn thing we can do about the freeness (or otherwise) of FreeDB.
Good idea: Shooting pool with the president.
Bad idea: Shooting at the president's pool.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Hi, I was running a freedb mirror for a few years, and had lots of contacts with the team during that period. The demise of freedb was not a pleasant surprise for me. I also must admit that it was the first time that the nickname Kaiser has shown up anywhere for me. I also submitted over 1000 entries over the last few years, mainly for local artists.
I am a bit surprised of the discussion I see here. I fail to see the added-value to anyone of putting the database in the free domain. In my opinion, the only ones who would gain from this are the commercial services like Gracenote (remember that their data used to be free as well), who could integrate it in their engine without giving anything back. I also have the feeling that it will spur a serie of clones, some free, some not, which will grow their own database, probably without sharing that with the others (and with a big fat EULA).
The principal strenghts of freedb are the size of it's database, and it's licence. I do think that a large part of the reason why it got as big, is because of it's licence. Also the commitment that the GPL gives, that is to make sure that any modification stays under the GPL, is great for a database, as it ensures that any update stays open.
For those reasons, i DO NOT agree that my efforts ne put in the public domain.
Here's a link explaining wikipedia..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
Oh, see, I was stuid and rather than googling it, I actually clicked the freedb link, which still didn't explain it very well.
As that will make it able to be hijacked as what had happened to cddb earlier.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
After reading all the responses to this post I notice no one's tried to answer the question, "how".
My first question is, how big is the database? If it's smaller than, oh, a few gigabytes, what I would do is use BitTorrent to distribute it. Tracker bandwidth shouldn't be large, and you'd want a dedicated seed server providing 20K/s of bandwidth. You'll probably also want to convince other people to run seeds, giving the downloaders more bang for their buck.
If the database proves to be unpopular, then the total torrent bandwidth will be slow, requiring people to spend days to download the data; but hey, at least they'll get it eventually. If it IS popular, then you won't be blowing your budget on your network connection.
According to the GPL FAQ:
The CD info is factual public-domain data, and song titles can't be copyrighted. Anyone's added comments or notes are copyrighted to their respective authors. The freedb software merely translated it into another form, which doesn't give them any ownership rights, and ergo they can't impose GPL on it.
Database dumps are NOT "source code" no matter what the freedb guys say. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.
The problem is that according to opinions I've been given, the GPL never could be applied to the particular case of the freedb data owing to the nature of it. That would mean that people have been submitting data for six years in the mistaken belief that their efforts were being protected from the big bad corporations somehow. If freedb.org has been a big fat lie all this time, wouldn't it be nice to clear that up?
BTW Don't confuse the freedb data with the freedb server software. They are different animals and there is no doubt that the server software is protected by the GPL. As for freedb2, I've been writing that myself from scratch since December 2004 and it has nothing to do with the original GPL'd freedb server software, and never did. I'll be releasing the rest of it under the new BSD licence when it is ready. The most important bits were already released quite a while ago.
Not if the author of the first work managed to flood the world with knowledge of its existence. Under U.S. copyright case law, copying happens where 1. the new work is substantially similar to the old work, and 2. the new work's author has had access to the old work. For instance, if a song was played on the radio ten years ago, everybody is assumed to have had access to it. Then the danger of coincidental similarity poses a difficulty. In addition, the doctrine of striking similarity allows a judge to infer access from similarity alone if the similarity is deep enough, placing the burden of proof of lack of access on the author of the new work.
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot's advice follows YOU!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
So if I spent 3 billion dollars measuring the speed of light to 20 digits accuracy, are you are saying that I should "own" the speed of light? That I should "own" that number? That I should own that fact? That anyone wanting to use that number in any game or in any other software would have to pay me whatever price tag I make up? Does it become my property simply because I assert that it is "intellectual property"?
I've got one for ya.
1) Take a Microsoft Windows XP Professional cd.
2) Create an
3) Convert the contents of the above ISO file to a long hexadecimal string.
4) [Alternative] Instead of#3, convert it to a base-10 (decimal) string.
QUESTIONS:
Is the resulting numeric value copyrighted?
Is it patentable / subject to patents? (i.e. jpeg/mpeg decompression, etc)
Does it fall under the DMCA?
Can the use/display/disclosure/tranfer of this *number* be regulated by criminal and/or civil law, and/or contractual agreements?
Well, "obligation" may be a loaded word, but from what little I know of this situation, the code is supposed to be Free Software, sooner or later, right? The fundamental principle behind Free Software is that everyone owns the code. We may dress that concept up in fancy wording for legal or poltical reasons, but that's what it comes down to. If so, and the author really does want it to be Free Software, he or she will need to accept that it is not their code. It would belong to everyone. So if the author really believes in that ideal, he's not withholding his code -- he's withholding our code.
Note that I'm not disputing an author's right to license his code any way he pleases (including not at all).
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I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.