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Should freedb's Data Be Public Domain?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cd-information-wants-to-be-free dept.

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'?"

20 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Why ask slashdot? by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good Idea: asking a lawyer for legal advice
    Bad Idea: asking /. for legal advice

    --

    Philosophy.
    1. Re:Why ask slashdot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Good idea: discussing issues
      Bad idea: using simplistic good/bad dichotomies

      In this area, asking Slashdot is a lot like Wikipedia - an excellent place to get ideas, pointers on where to look, some idea of what questions to ask, some thoughts on how to frame issues, etc.

      It's useful for that, and shouldn't be dismissed so readily.

      Now, if you make a significant decision based solely on what you've read here (or at Wikipedia), then you have made a mistake.

  2. My position... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:My position... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In your point of view, all the credit card and bank databases should be public domain too? For this information, I think maybe it could be public domain, but regardless of what happens I think the RIAA will sue in the near future. They can sue people for anything.

      A couple of key differences:

      1. I never said that all databases should be public domain. I said that I wasn't convinced they should be considered intellectual property, a term used to describe artistic works and forms of expression. That's what copyright was meant to protect.

      2. I am not against the protection of proprietary information in general, such as medical records, bank databases, or the recipe for coke. If anything, the owner if this information should be YOU, the patient, bank customer, or coca cola company. Aggrigators or maintainers of databases, should have an interest in keeping this information private to protect your interest, when it makes sense to do so. But really, I don't see anyone as "owning" the fact that you have such-and-such a credit card number, or the fact that you once had an AIDS test. You may seek or expect to have this information considered private or protected in some manner by whomever maintains it in accordance with a privacy polciy, but this is different from claiming "ownership" of collections of unfiltered, uninterpreted facts.

      3. This is the same kind of intellectual property insanity that leads to companies "patenting" parts of the human genome.

      Sooner or later, all this arbitrary classification of information is going to get a major reality check.

    2. Re:My position... by bm_luethke · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's hard to tell exactly where people stand on this based on what has been written, but I think I tend to be somewhere in between the two stances argued so far. It's possible both of the arguments are really just restating the samething in different ways or totally disagree with what I'm about to write.

      If I spend 3 billion dollars to map NYC to within a meter for a game I expect my data set to be legally protected. Really, that should be a no brainer. I'm not liscensing they layout - just liscensing the amount of work/money I have done. If you choose to donate time to *my* project that is your choice.

      OTOH I don't own the layout of NYC - there is nothing to protect (nor should there be) someone else from doing the same thing. Even if it turns out to be 100% exactly what I have - as long as you came up with it one your own. I can't see how someone would think they can own that type of data.

      To use the currect DB example - you shouldn't be able to own the knowledge that Band A wrote song B and it matches some hash of a given CD. That's like owning the layout to New York. However, if some company gathered all the information into a place then *that particular* database should not be copied. That is - having FreeDB simply run a script to query CDDB should be able to be made illegal, some one querying freedb to make thier own should be able to be illegal. If you don't like thier rules (and they fall within legal limits - obviously requiring ownership of your first born to access the DB shouldn't be legal). If you want one with a different liscense collect the data yourself.

      But then, that's not really the scope of the original article - they seem to accept that CDDB liscense is legal. At issue is that a group that professes "free" isn't what some contributors call "Free". I don't really have a dog in the fight, I've never cared one way or another - but hey, this is slashdot and I still have an opinion. Before I submit to anything I generally make sure I accept thier liscense - I don't find it entirely honest to submit then complain that it isn't what you want and try and force change. I tend to agree with the original article - it should be free-er especially given how they collect thier data. However that affects my desire to contribute, not complaining after the fact.

      Meh, I don't really see the point to much of the arguments. Databases should be legally protected (copyright or whatever is needed). The individual facts should not be legally protected (unless there is an overriding need of privacy such as facts like SSN's or credit card numbers). Read licenses before submitting work, if you don't like them don't submit work. If you really dislike them - start your own project. It seems pretty simple - someone violated any of the rules and you owned it you would be ticked (and I mean "you" as the current reader) - no reason to think that you should be able to violate it when it's against someone else.

      --
      ------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
    3. Re:My position... by JulesLt · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I suspect the answer actually lies in the same thing happening as with software, and you can already see it emerging - freemapping projects for cities, Wikipedia, are all examples of open databases. Eventually you'll get a tipping point, where it will become uneconomic for developers to use anything else, regardless of the merits (we can see this now with database technology).

      However :
        >I said, does your game make less money if another game uses the same database describing New York?
      If I paid for all the intensive labour (photography, 3D modelling) and that cost me $10 million and the game sells for $30 million, then I'd be a bit irritated at someone else making $50 million off 'my' data. To a degree it's not money that I've lost (you could argue I should have made my own Flight Simulator) but I have handed a competitive advantage to another firm (they didn't need to risk $10 million on doing the initial mapping against something that could have been a flop).
      You're painting an overly simplistic picture of business if you think that it's just about how much money you can make - it's also always about denying your competitors air.

      --
      'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh ... you have' (League Against Tedium)
    4. Re:My position... by Alsee · · Score: 3, Insightful

      NixLuver had good points I was going to make myself, which I won't bother repeating. Consider them seconded.

      So if I spent 3 billion dollars and mapped out every cubic meter of NYC in 3-D, to within a few meters accuracy, and used that in the next Grand Theft Auto game, you are saying you should be able to just copy that data wholesale and use it in Flight Simulator 2007?

      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"?

      What incentive do I have to gather that kind of data if I don't even own it?

      Apparantly your motivation was that you personally wanted to know and use those facts. No one if forcing you to do it if you don't want to. No one is forcing you to pay surveyors of you dont want to.

      And by the way, by your logic you would have to be paying all of the other freely published facts you make use of while making that game. Apparantly had some silly notion that you would be paying somebody when you copied the fact into your game that New York is 719 miles from Chicago, and that you paying someone when you copied the fact that New York is 204 miles from Washington D.C., and that you would be someone when you copied into your game physics engine the fact that the acceleration of gravity is 32.2 feet per second per second. Etc etc etc.

      It's a GOOD thing that you do not have to spend months or years tracking down god-knows-how-many "owners" and paying them god-knows-how-much money each when you make use of a thousand different published facts when you make a game or anything else. It's good that people do not need to engage in economicly wasteful duplication recollecting the same facts of reality just to establish a rediculous independant ownership of the exact same facts. In fact if you decide you don't want/need that crazy 3D map of New York, you can make your game for FREE and still make use of the distance between cities and a thousand other various published facts.

      Well gee! Look at that! Not having to pay people to copy readily available facts is an incentive for people to create stuff! And guess what? People still keep accumulating and publishing all sorts of facts!

      Should you be able to ignore both his and my intellectual property rights

      No one should be able to ignore anyone's patents.
      No one should be able to ignore anyone's trademarks.
      No one should be able to ignore anyone's trade secrets.
      No one should be able to ignore anyone's copyrights.

      A physical fact is not an invention and thus cannot be patented.

      To the extent you find a way to use physical fact as a trademark, it is not trademark infringment anyone to use it so long as they do not pretend to *be* the trademark holder and do not represent themselves as engaging in that business under that mark.

      A physical fact *might* be a trade secret, but once you freely choose publish that fact then you have by definition voluntarily given up its secret status. Trade secrets are only protected by law so long as you actually make proper legal efforts to maintain that secret status.

      A fact is not a creative work, and thus cannot be a copyrighted work. To quote the US Supreme Court "Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable... the most fundamental axiom of copyright law - that no one may copyright facts or ideas". As the text of copyright law has been revised over the years, Congress has o

      --
      - - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
    5. Re:My position... by tuxlove · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And CDDB ripped off the users how? Last I checked, both the data and source code they released to the public are what freedb was started with. When CDDB and freedb branched, they started with largely the same thing each other had. And who's got the better service? All of this really sounds like sour grapes by people who threw in their lot with the side who could only copy and not actually innovate;they're angry because freedb never went anywhere.

      Nobody here seems to have a clue about copyright law, or about the actual state of freedb data. First, the original CDDB data was never released under the GPL. Why not? Perhaps because you can't GPL data, only source code. But nobody here is actually a lawyer, so that little fact never seems to see the light of day here. Second, read those little CDDB data files, the ones that first came from CDDB itself. They all say "Copyright Ti Kan". That's right, a legal copyright notice that the data is owned by an actual individual. By law, that simple statement is enough for Ti Kan himself to claim ownership of the data. But copyright law does not protect collections of data (like the phone book), so it's questionable if the data is really protected or not.

      By releasing the data under a different copyright (as they have already done, frankly), freedb would essentially be saying, "We're going to steal this data from Ti Kan. But we think we're justified because we're free and open and FU to anyone who wants to keep data from being free. Even if we don't own it. Besides, copyright law is in our favor, so never mind if it's hippocritical or unjustified for us to make this data our own. We don't care, and nobody can stop us." But because the law is somewhat murky, and because the provenance of the current dataset is unclear, the data is essentially public domain already. But those who are pushing to make it officially public domain are just as "greedy" as those thieves they accuse of taking the data from the users. If you stole it from others, I can steal it from you! Then I'd be stealing from you, not them.

    6. Re:My position... by cpt+kangarooski · · Score: 4, Insightful
      If someone goes to the work of building a compilation of materials that is expensive to build and maintain, their efforts should be protected.

      Why?

      The law shouldn't protect freeloaders like this.

      Why not? And just so you know, these are honest questions.

      It is not difficult to demonstrate originality in creation when enormous amounts of energy are expended in the process of doing so.

      Oh? Well, I seem to recall that the Supreme Court said this, about this very subject:

      It may seem unfair that much of the fruit of the compiler's labor may be used by others without compensation. As Justice Brennan has correctly observed, however, this is not "some unforeseen byproduct of a statutory scheme." It is, rather, "the essence of copyright," and a constitutional requirement. The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This principle, known as the idea-expression or fact-expression dichotomy, applies to all works of authorship. As applied to a factual compilation, assuming the absence of original written expression, only the compiler's selection and arrangement may be protected; the raw facts may be copied at will. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.
      --
      -- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
    7. Re:My position... by 1u3hr · · Score: 2, Insightful
      If I spend 3 billion dollars to map NYC to within a meter for a game I expect my data set to be legally protected. Really, that should be a no brainer.

      So what if you blow 3 billion dollars? That's your problem. It's not a creative work so it can't be copyright. Better you just made a fictional map. A week or so ago some scientists cracked the encryption of the Galileo GPS signal, so they could use it for free. Their lawyers said it was fair game, as it was just data describing locations, even thjough it probably cost a few billion to get the satellites in orbit. Sounds similar to your hypothetical.

    8. Re:My position... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
      So if I spent 3 billion dollars and mapped out every cubic meter of NYC in 3-D, to within a few meters accuracy, and used that in the next Grand Theft Auto game, you are saying you should be able to just copy that data wholesale and use it in Flight Simulator 2007?
      Absolutely.
      What incentive do I have to gather that kind of data if I don't even own it?
      I couldn't care less.
      Shouldn't I just wait for someone else to do it so I can copy it?
      That's up to you.
      How do I get a return on that investment?
      That's your problem. The world doesn't owe you a return on your investment.
      What if I licensed the data from a contractor?
      Go for it. The facts represented in the data should still be free to all, though.
      Should you be able to ignore both his and my intellectual property rights, and pay us nothing for the work that we did surveying the entire city?
      What intellectual property rights? Remember, we're discussing a view where you don't have those. One cannot ignore that which doesn't exist.
      How, then, would I pay the surveyors in the field?
      That's your problem. The world does not owe you solutions to your problems.
      How does any company that works solely with data in the information age stay in business if they don't own their data?
      Not my problem. If it's a bad business model, then it should fail. The world does not owe a business success.
  3. Legal has nothing to do with it by BVis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:WTF is freedb? by Simon80 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/....

    Just this time, however, I've saved you the trouble:

    freedb is a free CD and music data base service to look up textual metadata about music, audio or data CDs. This is done by a client which queries the freedb database. As a result, the client displays the artist, CD title, track list and some additional information. Clients are for example CD player, CD ripper and CD burn software. Freedb does not offer such clients.

  5. profit by freedb by freqmod · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  6. Re:Data is GPL by julesh · · Score: 2, Insightful

    False or erroneous facts might not be copyrightable, but an expression of them (e.g. a Slashdot comment) is.

    Noone can come after you for paraphrasing Slashdot comments.

  7. My point of view as a former server maintainer by Cyborg00_ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:My point of view as a former server maintainer by megari · · Score: 2, Insightful

      IANAL, but I am always right nevertheless. ;)

      Okay, let us discuss if the database is copyrightable in the USA, Australia, Canada and the European Union for the hell of it.

      First of all, USA. Oh boy, this will be the most controversial passage. It seems that there's a strange consensus that the Feist Publications Inc. vs. Rural Telephone Service Co Inc. case automagically means that freedb is not copyrightable in the US. I argue it _is_ due to several factors, such as originality and innovativity in the way data is organized and extras people have entered which constitute original, creative work. Freedb is different from Rural's phone directory in that the way the data is organized is not dead obvious and it contains information that is easily argued to be original and creative. Both of these are different from the main points of the US Supreme Court ruling Rural's database noncopyrightable.
      Stripping all of the creative work and abandoning all of the current organization of the data may or may not be an option to free oneself from the obligations of the license - you'd probably have to be sued to find this out conclusively. I agree that the discid may be a redundant notion in well-organized real databases, but it was an innovative solution back when the original author of xmcd had to come up with a sensible way to organize the data in a flat database so that it would be easy and fast to find entries matching the discs in the user's CD drive without scanning through the whole database (with time the sensibility of the design turned out to be questionable for what the database ended up being used for, but that's beside the point). Thus I consider the notion of a discid definitely innovative, creative and original.

      Unlike in the US, in Australia, Telstra's database was ruled copyrightable alone by the hard work required to construct it without even having to consider the creativity and innovativity aspect further. The case went to Full Court of the Federal Court which ruled unanimously for the copyrightability by stating that the datasebase has originality by virtue of Telstra obtaining and listing the data. The special leave to appeal the Full Court of the Federal Court decision was denied. This was a polar opposite of the US decision and should make it quite difficult to argue that an Australian would be allowed to turn the freedb database into Public Domain as it not only contains facts laborfully gathered and made available by the community (which appears to be sufficient for copyrightability) but also an amount of creative and innovative work.

      Canada appears to be somewhere in the middle (CCH Canadian Limited vs. The Law Society of Upper Canada). I haven't read up on it enough to make even a semi-informed opinion. However, I don't think things are as clear as topham seems to make them to be. I will read the relevant documents in detail tomorrow.

      AFAIK the Europan Union Database Directive should make it difficult to argue that freedb is not copyrightable in the European Union. This is as much as I'll say about it, as I have not read up on its details too much yet. The relevant directive and law implementations are publicly available for everyone to read, so I'd appreciate if someone could shed some light on EU's side of things.

      I would argue that making the freedb database PD even in the Western countries will be a hassle at the very least and may be considered copyright infringement in some legislations. In any case, I would advise against it due to the effect on one's reputation it could have: releasing the database into public domain would likely be followed by companies making proprietary versions of it, which a lot of people would not like. I find the GPL, while awkward in the context of a database, something that protects the freedb database from corporate interests. If it absolutely must be relicensed (assuming it were allowed), then something else than PD should be used IMO.

  8. Re:Submitter let freedb die! by Infernal+Device · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's a pretty strong accusation. Where's your proof?

    --
    "My God...it's full of trolls!"
  9. No, not public domain by wolverine1999 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As that will make it able to be hijacked as what had happened to cddb earlier.

    --
    SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
  10. Re:Need to sue Horar if he continues by greg1104 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You are suggesting a solution to a technical problem that relies upon wasting large quantities of money by feeding it to lawyers. If you were a corporation, slashdot users would mock you openly for doing such a thing.

    Every minute spent talking about who's at fault and who to sue should be put toward coming up with a better solution to the CD data issue. Since the users of freedb are skewed heavily toward high levels of geekiness, all it should take to cripple Horar's efforts is a better answer to the problem of "how can I get information about this music CD?" than the one he creates. The definition of "better" in this case may include "hosted by someone who isn't a jerk", which Horar may or may not be; I'm still haven't figured out whose fault all these problems really are.

    P.S. I have already ripped off the entire freedb database--it's downloaded onto my local PC. The very concept of "ripping off" freedb doesn't even make sense.