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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."
let them know how you feel by contacting them directly
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.
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.
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.
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.