Gracenote Founder Rewriting History At Wikipedia

An anonymous reader writes "Gracenote founder Steve Scherf is busy again in his attempts to rewrite history after his recent interview at Wired. This time around he is aggressively deleting or seeking removal of any content on Wikipedia that discusses the controversy behind the commercialization of the formerly GPL'd cddb. Slashdotters may remember when cddb joined the Bad Patent Club back in 2000. Gracenote followed up by filing lawsuits against its customers for trying to switch to freedb and for alleged patent violations. Are there any Slashdotters out there who know the facts about Gracenote — its history, its business practices, its lawsuits? Wikipedia needs your help."

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

let them know how you feel by contacting them directly

Re:nobody cares much any more

[interiot]

Wikipedia has funding not directly related to Wikipedia, and in a way that can exert no possible editorial control or ownership over Wikipedia, eg. from wikia and answers.com. Having a decent amount of revenue on the side ensures that Wikipedia won't be at risk of needing on-site advertisements or otherwise having to cede any hint of editorial control to corporate interests.

Re:Nope. Not going to work on Wikipedia

[hogfat]

But there has to be actual parody to uphold. Outright claiming the man sodomized llamas and spent time in jail isn't parody unless his past indicates some sort of association with llamas, jail, et cetera. Otherwise, it's simply slander. And that sure looks like slander.

Re:My 0 cents

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the best way to Fight Shitnote.

In Windows at least. "replace '-' with a space"

Add the following settings to the hosts file Located at \WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

212.91.252.38-----------cddb.cddb.com
212.91.252.38-----------cddb.cddb.org
212.91.252.38-----------cddb.cddb.net
212.91.252.38-----------us.cddb.com
212.91.252.38-----------sc.ca.us.cddb.com
212.91.252.38-----------sc2.ca.us.cddb.com
212.91.252.38-----------sj.ca.us.cddb.com
212.91.252.38-----------sj2.ca.us.cddb.com

You can also download an appropriate hosts file and put it in your Windows-directory, if you don't want to add the entries by hand. You can test if this works by directing your browser e.g. to cddb.cddb.com. You should see the freedb-website instead. Instead of using 212.91.252.38 as IP-address (which is the address of us.freedb.org), you can of course use the IP-address of any of our mirrors.

Re:nobody cares much any more

[Anonymous Coward]

However, Jimmy Wales does retain final decision authority over Wikipedia, and has thrown his weight around in rewriting the history of the Wikipedia with respect to: a) the initial funding from Wales' company BOMIS, which published photos of women with dildos, or b) removing co-founder credit from Larry Sanger after Sanger left the project.

Re:Interesting guilt plea

[Kesh]

I don't know whose press releases you're reading. Even on the site itself it says not use Wikipedia as a source, just as a jumping-off point.

Re:Copyrights of the database entries?

[damiangerous]

Everything that you write, even a shopping list, automatically has your copyright

No, it doesn't. Just as a list of ingredients is not protected neither are facts. The manner of expression of those facts may be protected, but it certainly is not in the simple statement of "Album X by Band Y contains songs A, B, C and D" which is what the cddb is.

Re:Apple CD Drive tracked CD song names in 1987 !

[Anonymous Coward]

1997 Tech Note from apple on CD Remote Programs, the prior art that crushes all of GraceNote's patent claims using blatantly similar prior art :

http://developer.apple.com/technotes/dv/pdf/dv_25. pdf

specifically the user editable and SHARABLE after editing and saving to otehr machines field called "'STR#' Resource" there are many mnay fields in the playlist database but the track names summoned upon cd insertion later based on a unique ID is in the document and user software ran by millions of customers as early as 1987

Unique1ID() generates the hardy GUID for the CD

Here is a 1996 page posted from a book "New Complete Mac Handbook" but the apple player with user editable track names goes back to apple antiquity (march 1987):

http://www.mcn.org/heidsite/audio/CDplayertips.htm l

many 3rd party tools imported and exported into apples track name database directly , at least 5 or 6 products

Re:What a loaded question

[interiot]

Technically, it's Wikipedia policy to delete libellous revisions from the page history, [1] since it could be a legal issue. The same thing happened on the Seigenthaler page, as soon as Seigenthaler notified Wikipedia about the problem with his page, the libelous versions were deleted from history. [2] [3] In practice, there's a ton of vandalism, and libelous versions don't necessarily get deleted unless/until they're pointed out as being a problem ...and as you pointed out, it's not like this particular bit of information isn't recorded on Slashdot for posterity's sake.

Microsoft was never a CDDB licensee??

[BoboB-69]

Found this wonderful bit of truthiness from Scherf at the Gracenote talk page at Wikipedia. He is in denial that no developers dropped CDDB (now Gracenote) after the commercialization. His memory must be deteriorating:

(snip) you would understand that Microsoft was never a licensee, so the claim that they dropped Gracenote is totally impossible and false. Microsoft initially used third parties (who in turn used a wide variety of data sources, sometimes their own hand-entered data), not CDDB/Gracenote for its "Deluxe CD Player" product.(/snip)

Here is the press release from Scherf's own company Gracenote's former parent, Escient about their purchase of CDDB, and it clearly states that Microsoft was a licensee :

The CDDB database currently provides music CD identification information to more than 25 officially-supported players, including the new Microsoft(R) Deluxe CD Player (MSFT), as well as the Notify CD Player, Quintessential CD Player, Discplay 4, and Xmcd. http://web.archive.org/web/20000528085307/www.esci ent.com/aug1198.htm

Re:My one and only comment

[BoboB-69]

all of the data collected before CDDB went commercial has already been released, and the lookup code is GPLed too? Surely you jest. Right after the commercial release, not only did these jokers lock up the database, they also threatened anyone using the GPL'd version of the database or the code (it is called freedb) with potential patent infringement lawsuits. They followed through by suing customers such as Roxio in 2000, and Musicmatch in 2002. There were numerous cases of other customers being bullied by these same tactics and forced into a path which avoided use of freedb. You can read one developer's story in the Rants & Raves at the bottom of the Wired article. There are many others if you ask around in the digital music industry. It was not until Musicmatch defeated the Gracenote patent infringement lawsuit in August 2004 (the companies settled shortly thereafter), that developers were set free to use CDDB/Gracenote alternatives without fear of being legally beaten with a large patent stick. Scherf & Company did everything in their power to make sure this "released" database was not used by anyone. Neitther Scherf nor his company did not "release" the database, it was already in the public domain because of Ti Kan - who does not work at (dis)Gracenote.