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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.
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.
I think that the blurb was more of a failed attempt at invoking a bad cliche than it was factual. Face it - the writing and editing here have always sucked and will always suck in the future. You just have to tune out the bad cliches, bad grammar, bad spelling, and bad humor. That usually leaves you with a link to an article, and if you use Google you can usually find the actual information that the article is re-reporting. That said, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em: never RTFA and post lots of comments. Doing anything else will grind the system to a halt. :P
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
...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?
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.
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.....
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
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.
MusicBrainz is the future.
"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.
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