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Gracenote Defends Its Evolution
In the beginning was a music recognition database called CDDB, and it was good. Now, people accuse Gracenote of stealing its success. CDDB and Gracenote architect Steve Scherf sets the record straight.
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I've never really understood why people are angry at GraceNote. If you put information out into the world, expect others to copy it. Expect some to take it and make it profitable. Expect someone to get some gain out of it that you might not be able to or even want.
Yes, there are various State-run ways to try to protect content or ideas (copyright, trademarks, patent, etc). These are useless for everyone but the ultra-powerful who can afford to litigate copyright infringement. Don't believe me? Try to battle someone copying your music, art or words.
My own sites ALL repudiate copyright -- I release it into the public domain, and even tell people to stick their own name on it. I make my profit two ways: I gain incredible information from the replies on slashdot or on my blogs or forums (that's free information from you to me), and I leverage that information into my "real life" of consulting and speaking engagements.
If you reply on slashdot, theoretically you own the content of your post. But how many people take your post and use it to form their own opinion? Who owns the newly formed opinions? In my mind, no one, ever. Sure, you may have submitted some CD information to CDDB, but who is to say that the information is unique to you -- and even if it was, who cares what CDDB did with it if you gave it away freely. Even if you put a restriction on it, how are you going to stop CDDB from changing its business model? If Linux all-of-a-sudden was ripped off completely by a big company and sold commercially, how would you fight it? With what funds?
What Grace Note did might seem mean or wrong, but I don't see a problem with it. People volunteer information for free all the time (see slashdot or any blog's comments). Other people use this and work hard to find value out of that information for others. It is the continued labor of working that is valuable to the market, not the one-time work that someone hopes to make repeated profits on.
How can the company be adequately defending itself if these pleasant comments are coming from a guy who's not really in charge at all? Having read the article, I have some respect for this employee, but it hardly means that Gracenote the firm no longer merits blame.
Really, I could have sworn CDDB uses a horrid format obviously designed by retards. Sure, it might be better than nothing, but that still doesn't make it good.
I like the tone of "we did nothing wrong, it was the investors' fault, and besides, all our functionality and data are already available through freedb".
Yeah right, so the community had to duplicate a lot of the work that was "donated" to CDDB, while Gracenote profited from it without giving back. His point that the data before CDDB went commercial can still be downloaded is flawed; we're interested in what happened *after* you took all that hard work that you got for free and started charging for it. Besides, that's not "giving back"; that's "whee, we're making a boatload of money here, but hey, have some leftovers of the WORK YOU DID FOR US which we happened to leave behind!".
That's ok, I think the community did a good-faith effort and look how things turned out. I'd say no hard feelings, but I also don't think CDDB can expect a lot of community support or understanding in the future, pretexts and explanations nonwithstanding.
Organisms that take from the host without contributing to the host are called parasites.
Enough parasites and the host dies. Witness, for instance, commercial music.
If all else fails use C4
(Think about it for a minute and you'll get it)
some people still use 8-track
Why should someone be upset that Gracenote is using community donated data commercially? It's all still out there free (freedb? don't have linky). If you give something away (CD information, $5 to the bum on the street, winning lottery numbers), what the recipient does with it isn't your problem or responsibility. Either you are giving it away, or you are trying to elicit payment of some kind (without specifying what you want - should you be surprised that you don't get it?), in which case, you aren't giving it away. Anyone concerned that their data is being used has a problem with the entire concept of 'donate'
I submitted data to cddb. Why did I do it? Why take the time to type in the tracks?
Because I thought that I am submitting my data to the public. I thought that if I submit my data, so will others, and we'll have a public resource that everybody can use. But suddenly, that public resource turned private - I could not use it freely as before. They tricked me into giving them a resource, and then treated it as if it is their own property.
It is as if I gave a dollar to a public project - say a server to run slashdot on, thinking that if everybody contributed a dollar to that resource, then the public will have a resource - slashdot will have a fast server. And then slashdot suddenly turned around, took the $100k that people contributed, added another $100k from their own money, and said that now you can only access slashdot under certain conditions.
It is true that what they did was legal, but I think it was highly unethical. They for sure tricked me out of 5 minutes of my time.
Anyone who has worked with CDDB would disagree. Jamie Zewinski provides a detailed summary of its shortcomings. That someone steps forward as its "architect" makes me chuckle.
an ill wind that blows no good
They never validate ANY of the entries.. All too many times I go to get the information and rip and realize the track names are wrong and out of order. I thought the whole purpose of these databases was so you don't have to do any work!!
Seems like Gracenote employed people to create a product and failed to paid. Since they seem to happy to profit from this I'd assume a request for payment would be a good start. I don't see ehere they have refused to pay for the data their profiting from? Of course, I don't see anyone sending them a bill either. Whining? Complaining? Sure. But, asking for what is due, I must have missed that part.
If you have requested to be paid for your work, and they have refused it's time for a lawyer. I seem to recall the unpaid admins for AOL won such a suit, but I'm too lazy to look it up.
Again, if they have profited from your work, just ask for your share. I can't say what they did was legal, but I'm sure it was not polite. I'd stay away from people that act this way.
Good luck.
> We lost a lot of sleep over the situation (I did, at least), because it was clear we had to change
> or become irrelevant.
So what? An open source project is as popular as its users want it to be. I'm never going to pay to use that sort of service, because there's a free one out there, and it just isn't worth any money to me. Becoming closed-source and non-free is surely more likely to make it irrelevant, not less.
...is not so much that Gracenote took CDDB and closed it. The REAL issue is that Gracenote's contractual agreements with vendors like Apple (f.e.) preclude Apple (f.e.) from implementing a choice in track databases for iTunes.
You use Gracenote in your software, you're prevented by your license from allowing users to choose freedb.
That's suck turned up to 11.
What good is the original db being available, open, free if no one can realistically use it in the real world?
What's Gracenote, is it money from Graceland???? :^P
Live life to the fullest, you only get one chance at it.
Wired: You built your business upon data donated in good faith by your users.
Steve: blah opnion blah done before Ti Kan blah.
Wired: To charge them for the data that they sent in? Doesn't that seem wrong?
Steve: blah blah investors market blah FreeDB still exists..
Wired: But you forced the community to produce FreeDB as a last-ditch resort. It was a needless duplication of a huge amount of work.
Steve: blah not greed blah GPL blah blah.
I read that whole smarmy article hoping that we'd finally get a decent answer. No dice. It's just a bunch of wandering by a guy who has gone to the McNamara school of interviewing ("don't answer the question you were asked, answer the question you wish you were asked"). But it's easy enough to counter this trick: just keep asking the question that you want answered.
Wired, you let him off the hook easy.
In another page in his site, he claims to have created an mp3 jukebox software, which is no longer maintained, and he recommends people to use iTunes instead. In other words, this Zawinski guy is nothing but an astroturfer, and a particularly inept one, he is so rabid one feels repulsion to everything he says.
I wish Gracenote all the best in making a profit off the data they collect. What I find disappointing and a betrayal of its own users/data providers is Gracenote's latest for-profit initiative to use its database to pursue those that the RIAA and labels very loosely (or often inaccurately) define as copyright violators. So, it could be possible that data I provide to Gracenote could be used against me by Gracenote to assist the RIAA or their cohorts in one of their heavy handed copyright suits. Nice...
In 1995-1996 I was running a popular web site I set up called The CDPLAYER.INI Project.
It worked with the Windows CD Player / Media Player application which identified CDs as long as the tracks and titles were in an INI file in your WINDOWS folder.
People would e-mail in their albums as text snippets and I would add them to the INI which users could download. There would be a new version practically every day.
It hit the buffers when the file got to 64K, which was the maximum size of an INI file in Windows 95 - then it had to start being partitioned and the need for a custom application became apparent.....
This is not about giving or sharing cookies.
In my neighborhood, a bunch of parents got together recently and donated a bunch of money to upgrade a schoolyard playground beyond what the local government would have put there by default. Now let's pretend the school is a private company. If we follow your line of reasoning, it would then be just fine for the school to sell the new playground to the highest bidder?
My answer is: of course not. Yes, the school would have the legal right to sell the playground. But just because something is legal doesn't make it moral.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
What, did you expect him to say:
"We screwed our customers over big time, but it is perfectly legal so everything's fine. Also, we really don't care about investors either, and anything that goes wrong is their fault. We have a bad business model and are just trying to profit from other people's misery instead of innovating."
If he had actually answered the question truthfully he would have been fired.
I am officially gone from
CDDB/FreeDB, and their ilk are essentially useless becuase they have allowed any jack-ass to submit their version of song titles, artists names, genre, etc..
One need only query one of these databases to see the huge variety (hardly any free of major errors) of entries for a single album - I recommend U2's "The Joshua Tree" as a case in point.
I wrote a little freeware app for the Mac (NetCD) which used the then-free CDDB, and its development ended as I watched the MacWorld Keynote where Steve first announced iTunes. I wasn't bitter and still am not... iTunes did it right, and I was happy to see it (and know it was free).
The fact that iTunes used CDDB (and they actually managed to engineer a different agreement that was better than what the rest of us developers had... probably because Apple paid Escient to do so) was what really ensured that FreeDB would stay on the sidelines. When the CDDB was free, there was no need for FreeDB; during the short time after Escient bought the CDDB and before iTunes came out, FreeDB was growing steadily but hadn't achieved enough fame to move ahead of the CDDB. When iTunes came out, Joe User, when asked where the track names were coming from, would answer "iTunes puts it there." The CDDB (and FreeDB) was nurtured by geeks and hobbyists; Escient's (and Gracenote's) version was/is used and abused by consumers.
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
There was an appropriate time to apologize and explain Gracenote's side of the story. It was when Gracenote took all the information we had put into the database, locked our client programs out of using the servers, and made deals to get rich from our data. It's really far too late to do anything about Gracenote's reputation now.
FreeDB sucks (everything is 'Folk'), but I'll take it over Gracenote any day.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If what you said is right, then I have no problem with what cddb did. But I think the public data is not freely available, and that freedb was not a fork, but that instead all the data had to be gathered from scratch.
Can you maybe give a link to where the data can be downloaded freely? Is it used by freedb?
Because I thought that I am submitting my data to the public.
And you did submit it to the public, as the information is still available. Is this not true?
But suddenly, that public resource turned private - I could not use it freely as before.
There's a difference between the information you submitted, and the service to provide that information to your music player. It's your error in not seperating those two different things. You seemed to assume an agreement that never existed based upon some idea of "we're all in this together", but CDDB never actually said they'd provide. The real world doesn't work like that. If you want those kind of re-assurances they should be backed up by a legal agreement so no one is confused and assumes a relationship that doesn't exist.
Are you equally pissed off that Redhat decided to stop supporting the free (as in beer) versions of Redhat Linux? It's basically the same situation, since Centos has since popped up providing free as in beer copies and updates to what's essentially RHEL.
It is as if I gave a dollar to a public project - say a server to run slashdot on, thinking that if everybody contributed a dollar to that resource, then the public will have a resource - slashdot will have a fast server.
It's really nothing like that at all. You provided a resource to a company, and the company then went public and gave back all the resources that were given to them freely to anyone that wanted it. The problem with your analogy is you can't copy money, but you can copy information.
AccountKiller
The chap completely accepts that he took user contributed information, then locked it up in a private database. How is this setting the record straight? He has explained his motivation for doing so, but the fact is he still took the user contributions to build his product. He had no moral right to do this. Once you are accepting contributions from users, you have to accept that users feel a sense of ownership and entitlement. Many years ago (while I was still at school in fact) I put the effort to type in some early drum'n'bass cds into this public database, in return for the effort it saved me. I never thought for one second that some chap would start charging for access to this information and I certainly wouldn't have bothered typing any information in had I known it would become a commercial outfit within a couple of years. If only I could remember the cds that I entered into the database, then I could demand that Gracenote remove my info from the database.
This is why GPL license > BSD license.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
In my neighborhood, a bunch of parents got together recently and donated a bunch of money to upgrade a schoolyard playground beyond what the local government would have put there by default.
The analogy breaks down because information can be copied, but money can't. Also money is a fluid resource that can buy other resources.
It's be more like your community got together and bought sand, tires, playground equipment, etc to build a playground. A private company decided to donate land to put the playground on, and pays other people to install all the equipment and maintain the playground. Later on the company decides to charge for usage of the playground, but also gives you back all the sand, tires, and playground equipment, etc that you contributed. (This is some strange world where sand, tires, and playground equipment can be copied perfectly).
You're a bit peaved, but obviously you can still move the playground elsewhere as you still own everything you put into it. You and your neighbors find some inexpensive land next door and put all the playground equipment in yourself on the weekends.
This is really a lesson for people that assume relationships that don't exist.
AccountKiller
At the risk of being slashdotted, the full text of the interview can be found here. I appreciate Wired putting out this story, but they (quite understandably) edited the interview very heavily. There's a lot missing, so some of the points don't really make it through.
Strangely enough, I agree completely. People in this discussion seem to assume that anyone making money off something freely contributed by the community is in the wrong. They also can't seem to seperate the service of providing CD lookups from the information they contributed.
I will say that Gracenote sure didn't win any friends by suddenly switching to a paid model without warning. I won't even call it unethical behaviour, since they weren't under any obligation to provide the service. It does seem like kind of a dick move though as they knew there was a lot of software that relied on CDDB. All business relies on relationships, so this move by Gracenote was basically shooting themselves in the foot.
AccountKiller
Please use black text. The grey text on white is nearly impossible to read!
I think the biggest problem with gracenote is that they will threaten any company using freedb in their product with legal action based on their evil patent portfolio where they basically patented databse lookups over a network. He tries to point out that they've let freedb go on, but really they've worked hard to take it down.
Gracenote filed for patents on techniques that had already been published as open source, then threatened other companies with those patents. That's what I'd like their official representatives to explain in a Wired or Slashdot interview.
Nothing this bastard could say would make me feel any different. He stole my work and profited from it. I hope he gets scammed by a Nigerian or something - he scammed us all.
MusicBrainz is the future.
My problem is that they do not make the public part of their database - the part that was contributed by 1000s of users - freely available to the public.
Excuse me, but that statement is at worst wrong, and at best extremely misleading.
As others have pointed out, CDDB DID make all the data that was entered in before they became a private company freely available.
Maybe you're referring to the service of providing CD lookups? Why should they be obligated to privide that for free, as they're the ones that wrote the software that provided it? They still made all the publically created information freely available, so what's the issue here?
I'm just amazed that so few people in this discussion can understand the difference between information, and a service that provides that information in a nice way. I don't know the licensing/copyright for wikipedia operates, but for the sake of argument assume that the following scenario is perfectly legal: Would you be all pissed off if they took the information in wikipedia, polished it up a bit, and created printed textbooks or e-books for schools?
I just don't understand how people can be perfectly fine with a company like Redhat that takes open source contributions of thousands of developers, packages it nicely and supports it, and charges a fee for that. But when Gracenote does basically the same thing they're deemed "unethical".
AccountKiller
...as to when this Frox thing referred to in the article came out. I helped my then pal Ian Giblin implement his idea for CD recognition and track storage in 1993/4 when he wrote his RiscCD application for the ARM-based Acorn Achimedes running RISC OS. I don't think he, and certainly not I, was aware of anyone else doing this at the time. Does Ian deserve some recognition (that I can vaingloriously bask in ;)? A quick google for frox just seems to refer to some transparent caching ftp proxy software...
I reserve the right to be wrong.
"More importantly, the focus and dedication required for CDDB to grow could not be found in a community effort. If you look at how stagnant efforts like freedb have been, you'll see what I mean."
FreeDB has had problems from day one because Gracenote sued companies who tried to use alternate lookup systems. They sued FreeDB at one point over the database's content and raised questions over patent ownership and copyright ownership of the database. They've been complete bastards and he can go F himself over a 100% disingenuous statement like the one above.
support screws really don't enter into this: Anyone can use Gracenote recognition in their player (providing they use a player who's authors pay) to incorporate (currently) Gracenote's metadata for their convenience (saving hours of track-title typing), no betrayal involved (remember, define: donate). Anyone accessing your drive, or sniffing your "shared playlist" stream can use the metadata to attempt identification. As for RIAA hunting your sorry ass down for copyright violation, if you do the crime...
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning" - Catherine Aird
I don't know how accurate the stuff the guy from the article was saying, but it does seem logical that if you are trying to maintain a service on university and donated servers, you really can't have commercial applications using it. Also, if the freeware access reaches critical mass, you will cripple your donated servers, and probably piss off a few friends/IT contacts in the process. Nobody wants to burn bridges.
So would you rather have Gracenote or Microsoft dominating this area. Or the RIAA.
"I forgot my mantra."
I looked up one of my favorite CD's -- the OST to Supergirl (1984)
.org like slashdot has to show ads to pay the bills but that is pretty much the only way they can stay on the net. I doubt their 'subscription model' makes any sort of dent in their bandwidth bills.
Here's the proof:
MusicBrainz.org link to the 23-track SILVA AMERICA release.
'Decoded' affiliate link at Amazon.com.
Non-profit or not, musicbrainz.org 'get's paid' if you buy CDs via the amazon.com affiliate links imbedded in their site.
Slashdot CAPTCHA: squash
Ironic that a
I started using CDDB in the mid-90s, but I don't know Steve Scherf from a hole in the wall. The name I associate with CDDB is Ti Kan, and even wikipedia lists Ti Kan as the inventor of CDDB. It doesn't say anything about Scherf being the "co-creator". IIRC, Ti Kan also had a really nice Audi Coupe Quattro that was featured in european car.
-Rich
In any case, it seems my comments were made without sufficient information, and possibly wrong.
But hey, this is