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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.
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.
While you're right that legally Gracenote did nothing wrong, morally their actions were pretty nasty, because they took all the information that the community input into their database *for free* and then started making a profit out of it without giving back to the community. And "all the data you input up until we went commercial is here for you to use" doesn't count. Imagine if Wikipedia suddenly said "well, so long and thanks for all the fish, we're going commercial, oh and by the way, here's the archive of all your contributions so far, feel free to use it for whatever while I become a billionaire". Legal? yes. Feels right? nope.
Like you (and I) said, Gracenote were completely within their rights to do what they did. However they pissed off a community which helped them in good faith only to see access to community-generated data become commercial and closed. A lot of work had to be duplicated (freedb didn't come out of thin air you know). Community is not going to sue or anything, just don't expect us to have any sympathy for Gracenote.
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