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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'?"

5 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.
  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.

  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. 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!