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.

Comments

Why did people submit data to cddb?

[leehwtsohg]

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.

Re:Why did people submit data to cddb?

[Rob T Firefly]

Exactly. It's comparable to Wikipedia and other public knowledge infodumps. In the case of Wikipedia, the whole thing is run by a nonprofit foundation with all its policies, including all the legal terms you're releasing your contributions under, out in the open for all to see. It's a pretty safe bet that the Wikimedia foundation won't all of a sudden charge mandatory access fees and get rich off of what its users have spent years building up in good faith.