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

Re:Interesting guilt plea

[Anonymous Coward]

Because many people think that everything on Wikipedia is The Truth (tm)?

Re:Nope. Not going to work on Wikipedia

[pla]

Lets give him a legit reason for him to sue us. Yay.

Parody remains one of our few frequently-upheld forms of free speech. The more over-the-top, the less grounds he has to sue.

As for the side effect of damaging a valuable source of information, well, I will admit I have that as my sole reason for not editing quite a few entries on folks like Scherf, McBride, or Thompson. I respect the truth, if not the men.

But when someone like Scherf throws down the gauntlet and takes away the factual content aspect, well, not much point remains in exercising restraint, at least until someone really does fix the entry. So as a placeholder, why not let such asses suffer an entry on llama-buggery for a few weeks?

Re:Interesting guilt plea

[rednip]

Wikipedia should really have a disclaimer at the top of every page warning and reminding users that there's a good chance that the page below may contain absolutely no facts whatsoever. That really would solve a lot of issues, and is honest. It's a good idea, but why limit it to Wikipedia, it should just be built into the browser itself. For that matter the TV could print a such a warning when one changes the channel to Fox News. Seriously, part of being a 'responsible consumer of knowledge' from any source is knowing that the facts may be different than presented.