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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."
If this guy is in the clear, why care what wikipedia says?
...I find it interesting that so few reponses have hit this thread yet. I'm not outraged at the Gracenote nightmare (I got over it), but I would have thought that the cumulative efforts by many folks here would have sparked a bit more interest.
Its true, almost 10 years before CDDB and Gracenote's corrupt seizure of the formerly PD database and GPL software, apple did it first, though to a local file database on a hard drive and not over a longer distance to a file on another machine further away.
10 years!
Technically Apple wrote the cool stuff for its cd player app in 1987 but only shipped the hardware and player application in March 1988.
After March 1988 apples developer support added a technote available for purchase that let programmers know how to create the hash for a audio cd.
it was basically the 75th of a second frame duration of each audio track and the entire disc, from what I recall, not much different than CDDB and Gracenote 10 years later.
March 1988 for Apple. I used it back then, in fact I even bought the little technote, and hand typed all my cd song names and then copied the database OVER A NETWORK to all my mac and my buddies macs so that when i played cds on any mac in the computer lab the track names would all show up.
A lot of people forget how many years ahead of technology Apple was in 1988.
Gracenote seems to be.
When CDDB closed up shop and was seized by gracenote for corrupt 16 million dollar grab I think it had only 77,000 CDs? I have TAHT database (before when it was open), I also have the last free copy of FREEDB from a couple months back.
And... I still have a working 1988 appleCD scsi drive (for testing purposes).
Apples CD SOFTWARE device independent driver was so technologically wonderful eventually it had features no other driver had :
VOLUME CONTROL of separate channels, high speed audio seeking with feedback in fast scan, reverse or forward, MONO setting form either track, preposition silent pause and hold for sudden release for games like battlechess (no seek delay when audio started). In fact apple had 9 different play position modes, eventually apple was first to offer digital audio extraction in its drives and driver standard, and CD+G and CD+G players were written (part of FWB cd-rom toolkit). Apples driver even supported many block size settings such as reading R-W tracks only, or reading CD-XA using correct trim block sizes of 2352 bytes for VCD. VCD video players were written for macs and in the pc world the VCD playback was a bizarre hack using jumbo block sizes far alrger than needed for each CDXA block.
all those technologies would suffer and rot in some way (fast audio scanning, independent left-right volume, CD+G) over the years as people only cared about cheaper simpler non-sony mechanisms. Apple eventually tried cd drives from almost every vendor.
As a side note Gracenote is trying to buy patents to try and force Neilson and force MusicBrainz (libmusicbrainz ) off the net soon via onerous litigation by the way. (smaller fish first to fry) this has to do with audio fingerprinting emerging tech (EMI, Neilson), but no patents exist that are legit because tons of stuff far before MusicBrainz exists. In fact stuff even existed years BEFORE 2001 landmark paper : M. K. Mihcak and R. Venkatesan, "A Perceptual Audio Hashing Algorithm: A Tool for Robust Audio Identification and Information Hiding," LNCS, vol. 2137, 2001, pp. 51-65. Before Gracenotes new market for myspace.com and youtube.com mp3 auto-banning, and before shazam-EMI, and before even Neilson radio scanning song ID and comemrcial spot ID services.
Gracenote is corrupt through and through. Suing Roxio for usng FreeDB was very offensive. Frivolous patents suck.
I hope someone who cares mods this above 0.
I haven't gotten over Gracenote's theft yet. I typed in about 100 albums worth of data (out of my 400 album collection) and submitted it to the FREE CDDB. Gracenote stole my work and resold it.
But what's there to say here, really? Steve is a lying, two-faced asshole who probably actually feels wronged by all of the bad press he's earned. He belongs in the same category as Jeff Immelt and Sanford Wallace. In the same jail cell as well, actually.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Wikipedia has things in place for this thing. Check out the talk page for the Gracenote page and you will see that Gracenote employees are not longer editing the article and are working with each other to get the page to something that is agreeable to both sides.
Is there a 1-800 toll free number available? I'd rather it be on there nickel than an in email.
I curse them and their little dog too.
This is certainly happeing at the Gracenote article at Wikipedia. Gracenote employees like Scherf making all sorts of veiled legal threats and bullying the editors. Scherf himself has mentioned the word "libel" more than once in his comments, and that the Wikipedia article is somehow damaging to his company and they have a "responsibility to defend themselves". All the while, they accuse any source which conflicts with their view of the world as being incorrect or lies. This type of browbeating is unacceptable, especially because most of the stuff he is posting is flat-out incorrect.
Did CDDB require the people making the entry's onto the database to sign over the copyrights of the entries that were made?
Everything that you write, even a shopping list, automatically has your copyright, so if Gracenote are suing companies for using freedb, then it would be possible to argue that they are copyright violaters themselves. It would also be possible to use the DMCA or some other form of copyright legislation to get them closed down...
It would also be possible for them to get mired in a class action suit, for mis-using the copyrighted work of the entry-makers...
Sig. Measure Twice.
Gracenote did have a contract when the were CDDB.com. They claimed that everything would be "free" both as in speech and as in beer. They clearly posted at the bottom of the cddb.com website that all the code was GPL'd. It was a volunteer system asking for cooperation from users to enter data, developers to implement CDDB in jukebox software, and volunteers to host the servers. Most people were assuming they were helping out a good public cause. After behaving this way for a couple of years, Steve Scherf and company all of a sudden decided to make the whole thing proprietary, charge high license fees, and threaten patent-infringement against anyone who wanted to change to freedb. Bait and switch is what its normally called.
Gracenote founder Steve Scherf is busy again in his attempts to rewrite history after his recent interview at Wired
/. history. Much of the history of Gracenote has been rewritten here on this site (and others, to be fair) over the years, and it's pretty amazing to see stories like this one that claim we're the ones rewriting it. As I said in the full text of the Wired interview, some of the Gracenote lore is obviously true, and not all of it is pretty. There is no disputing that. But a lot of the tall tales that have spread over the years are pure dreck.
This is a pretty amazing statement, considering that the edits we're making on the Wikipedia article are supported by fact. The changes are also being facilitated by an impartial third party, after certain individuals continued to revert validated text under the guise of "unverifiable". Their behavior has illustrated the worst aspects of Wikipedia, as were first brought to wider public attention in the Seigenthaler incident. I've already given up on the page, because when you have Wikipedia editors disputing the verity of federal court documents, there is little point in continuing.
The reason for the Wired article was to hopefully shed some light on reality, not the
I have spent my time at Gracenote doing two things, improving and expanding the technology, and doing my best to steer the company so that the original philosophies of CDDB are not forgotten (though I do not have a huge influence at the company in that regard, as you might guess from some of the company's early behavior). There have been a number of times I have thought of leaving, such as when the company was doing something I felt was wrong, and I have gotten in numerous and protracted battles with them over the years. But I stayed, because without me, there would no longer be a touchstone for them with CDDB's history (the other two CDDB partners, Ti Kan and Graham Toal, two of the nicest and most mild mannered people you could ever meet, are not with the company). And I think it's been for the better, because Gracenote is now largely moving in the right direction IMO, even if they weren't in the past.
So, yes, Gracenote has a checkered past, and it does have its detractors. But when detractors hate something so much that they perpetrate acts against that thing that are as bad or worse than they claim have been done to them, it's time for them to engage in a little self-reflection. I say this not just for the Wikipedia "editors" who have been using the Gracenote page as a weapon against Gracenote, but for anyone who's formed a negative opinion of the company based on what they've heard here and there on the net. Read the Wired interview and use your own judgement, but for gods sake, stop abusing Wikipedia just to get at Gracenote (or anyone for that matter).
Steve Scherf