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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'?"
"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 am not a lawyer either, but I think I can help you out. Copyright law protection compilations where subjective taste is used to distinguish what gets included from what does not. I believe this was the distinction the Surpreme court used in Feist V Rural to determine that anthologies (the "The best of Edgar Allan Poe", for example) are protected by copyright, whereas complications of data that have no subjective criteria for inclusion (the phone book, in that particular case) are not subject to protection. In this case, I suspect they will take any CD's data; meaning that there is no subjective critera for inclusion, meaning that no copyright can be applied.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
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.
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?
What incentive do I have to gather that kind of data if I don't even own it? Shouldn't I just wait for someone else to do it so I can copy it? How do I get a return on that investment? What if I licensed the data from a contractor? 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? How, then, would I pay the surveyors in the field? How does any company that works solely with data in the information age stay in business if they don't own their data?
"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?"
Mmmm.... What commitment have you made to the original architects of the buildings that you've mapped out in NY? To the workers that built the streets? Are you paying them royalties or license fees? Do they 'own' their 'design'? Will your hypothetical "GTA-The Big Apple" make less money if our friend does use the same database in Flight Simulator? The point many are missing here is that databases are not creative acts, ie, not what IP was designed to protect; they are in fact labor intensive, even tedious. A 'database' is most saliently protected as a 'trade secret' or some such nonsense, but in the end I'm not sure it matters; as I said, does your game make less money if another game uses the same database describing New York?
Thinking outside my Head
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.
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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.
"If I spend 3 billion dollars to map NYC to within a meter for a game"
If you spend 3 billion dollars to map NYC for a game, I really hope you lose every cent of it, and learn a lesson.
There is no advantage for society as a whole in encouraging waste like that, those 3 billion dollars worth of work would be more or less a loss to the economy as a whole. If you couldn't recoup the money, then _GOOD_. Maybe that'll keep others from trying the same thing.
One really wishes that a whole lot of people would get the fundamental principles of capitalism. You dont _deserve_ a profit for making an investment. You get a chance at making a profit off an investment if you are more efficient than the competition, which means the economy as a whole becomes more efficient. That notedly precludes wasting money on things that are not likely to become profitable without government help; this is not a bug, it's a feature, that steers productive employment of capital into the most useful and desireable avenues of production.
Contrived is right. Inaccurate too.
A pacifist wouldn't take up arms against his enemy since he wouldn't be a pacifist if he did.
RMS is NO pacifist. He not only believes in software freedom but also in forcing his beliefs upon everyone else. There is nothing wrong with using the tools at your disposal to fight for what you believe. RMS didn't create copyright---it serves his cause so he uses it and there is nothing wrong with that.
The analogy is simply a poor one. In the case of free software, the pacifists (bsd-ers) aren't destroyed because of their idealism. Likewise, copyright itself isn't the tool of evil. Without copyright and the GPL, RMS couldn't distiguish himself from a BSD license and couldn't force other software authors to make source available to him. One could argue that, to a true software pacifist, RMS himself is just another devil.