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Gracenote Defends Its Evolution

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the well-straighter-anyway dept.

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.

12 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Very bizarre outcry from the techies... by dada21 · · Score: 4, Insightful


    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.

  2. From the article... by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This may sound hypocritical when you consider that Gracenote's own client software is closed source. To be frank, I have had little say in the matter of open-sourcing Gracenote software, so my opinions on the subject don't necessarily reflect that of the company.

    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.

  3. What's there to set straight? by Roadmaster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Why did people submit data to cddb? by leehwtsohg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Why did people submit data to cddb? by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
    2. Re:Why did people submit data to cddb? by Quaryon · · Score: 5, Informative

      I don't know how it works now, but if I recall correctly the big change that happened when CDDB became Gracenote was that they started insisting on a fee to be paid by application developers wishing to write code that would connect to their database. You would need some kind of unique developer key to connect, which cost money. This immediately meant that all the open source software that was previously able to use CDDB was suddenly without an information source for some of their functionality. It took some time for freedb to be set up with servers that could handle the required load, and for all the end-user application software to be able to redirect to those servers. This is the fundamental reason why a lot of people got very upset with Gracenote, because there was a time when all the information freely submitted to CDDB was unusable, as none of the pieces of OSS that people were using were able to access the data.

      So, you may not pay money yourself, but that doesn't mean that money is not changing hands in order for you to be able to use that feature.

      Q.

    3. Re:Why did people submit data to cddb? by leehwtsohg · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I have no problem with them using the info that I contributed for their own cause. I have no problem with people selling linux, or the wikipedia on a DVD. 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. The fact that they only stole 5 minutes of my time doesn't make it any less of a theft.

      If they had announced ahead of time "please contribute to our database, and eventually we will change the access rights so that only qualified clients can access the database.", I am not sure that I and other people would have contributed our time (i.e. money) to them. (and I mean client in the sense of computer program, not customer).

    4. Re:Why did people submit data to cddb? by Rakarra · · Score: 3, Informative
      Now, I don't remember what the original submission disclaimer for CDDB was, but I don't see anything legally -- or morally -- wrong with what Gracenote has done.

      I see something ethically wrong with one thing Gracenote has done.

      Gracenote has sued other companies (such as Roxio) that have used FreeDB, saying Gracenote owns software patents to CD-identifying technology. That so many people worked to contribute to a freely-available resource, only to have that resource closed and then have the closer use lawsuits to attempt to stifle competition came as a slap in the face. Now, this was five years ago, and maybe Gracenote has behaved themselves since then, but after that I chose to use FreeDB instead.

      And no, Gracenote did not "release the database to the FreeDB," FreeDB copied a two-year-old mirror that had been made before Gracenote was formed, before it closed the database. Gracenote's position has been that the data was owned by them. In fact, they used the arguement that XMCD added copyright tags to each submission setting the copyright to the CDDB maintainer, copyrights which then passed to Gracenote when they were formed and said maintainer was an employee.

  5. Was it good? by amightywind · · Score: 4, Informative
    In the beginning was a music recognition database called CDDB, and it was good.

    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
  6. Don't bother... The questions are never answered. by dozer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. I always wondered if it was based off my idea.. by Renesis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.....

  8. Oh he can go sc3w himself... by gmezero · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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.