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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
If this guy is in the clear, why care what wikipedia says?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gracenote+cdd b+site%3Aslashdot.org&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
If I can remember reading stories about this on slashdot from years ago, I'm sure someone else has and undoubtably someone has been keeping track of gracenote's movements.
Are there any Slashdotters out there who know the facts about Gracenote -- its history, its business practices, its lawsuits? Wikipedia needs your help.
Who needs facts? If Scherf wants to change history, let's damn well change it!
I think the new entry should start, "Gracenote founder Steve Scherf has come a long way from his younder days of meth-fueled llama sodomizing. While once it looked like he'd soon die in a gutter, that six months he spent in the federal pen for killing a bussload of nuns while drunk (which he coyly refers to as "Happy happy shower butt fun time") cleaned him up, allowing him to become the ruthless corporate asshat we know today."
Revisionist history works both ways, Steve. Don't fuck with the geek masses - We can "fix" your entries MUCH faster than you can.
Where's the grace in Gracenote? And why are people always actively destroying their own credit, revenu and business in search for some unattainable monopoly?
Occam's Razor - One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
and ultimaty possible undoing. The problem is that a small group of people with prodigious amounts of time can delete and browbeat editors, in a usually succesful attempt at pushing their and only their point of view on wikipedia. Rather than strive for accuracy and truthfulness, they have no fear of continual edit wars until they brow beat other editors into compliance. As more learn how to "game" Wikipedia, any sort of seemingly controversial subject or topic will be deleted off the pages, as most editors do not have 24/7 time to patrol the pages that apparently some groups have. This prodigious amount of time lets them fly by the 3RR rule with ease. I suspect corporations and politicians have hired such groups to do just that.
I welcome a healthy debate over any topic. But the rules concerning censorship needs to be enforced much more strongly with IP bans being put in place for those that engage in censorship rather than "editing." I just don't see that happenning with the Jimbo Wale's mutual admiration society and structure that Wikipedia seems to promote.
Another article that this happens a lot with is the "Muhammad" article. No muslim will let *any* historical artwork depicting Muhummad on that page as its against their religion. Forget about truthful statements that might cast the prophet in a bad light or go against their religion (like that he founded Islam and married a young girl or his military murders). People need to chime in that this is censorship and nothing more there too.
Posting anon so I'm not trolled on Wikipedia.
...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.
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?
I don't know whats what, but its probably best to keep this stuff in the wiki. By all means people can contribute to the page but make sure you understand the various ways of wikipedia before turning this into something bigger than it is.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Geez, I mean, after CDDB, IMDB went commercial, too.
It's all really old news, now.
Wikipedia has commercial arrangements, too.
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
Some Wikipedia administrators have been known to try remove any content that criticizes them at all, just look at Encyclopedia Dramatica (link semi-irrelevant). From what I've seen many Slashdotters seem to think Wikipedia is a great, open website just because a lot of its articles are good and "anyone" can edit it. Sorry to say, but this is far from true.
I think the history is already linked from the summary itself :)
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ahh... I cannot continue...
He's right about one thing:
From the Wiki Talk page:
"We don't care about advertising"
Anyone who'd make such an ass of his company to its userbase obviously doesn't care about public perception at all.
Somebody kept editing it saying the population of Gracenote has tripled in the last six months.
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.
...and removed (though not by me). For those interested, the diff is here.
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.
never worked together? and winamp has an animal logo of? TADA!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
what we all think is true is true. lets make this guy a real bastard.
Jeff Minter, is that you?!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Quit denying the facts, Steve. We have every right to reject your Wikiality and substitute our own.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
Well, you know, that's wikipedia for you. It's actually a highly biased encyclopedia. Just go into any politically interesting article and look through the revision history. You'll see both sides adding and deleting slants to the article that agree or disagree with their own biased point of view.
Their NPOV policy is a joke.
Sorry, guys, but calling out for a Wiki edit war on a message board, no matter how correct you are about the need for correction, is very, very bad form.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Every time I have seen one of these topic and I go look at the page it have been vandalized by someone seeing it here. This time I look at the page and someone had stapled the slashdot entry to the bottom of the gracenote page. It is the same thing with Fark, posting about wikipedia controversies on popular forums like this just makes the problem worse.
And now even removed from the history as libel. Magical.
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.
What's your beef with Immelt?
It's a bit ... rich to be criticising people for using screen names when you're doing it yourself, isn't it? I don't see your real name on this post.
That being said, many Wikipedia contributors either use their real name, or if they use a handle give their real name on their user page.
I worked at a company acquired by GE; we were ALL required to take a mandatory all-day *ethics training course*. Mine was held the Friday before the story about Jack Welch's unbelievably lavish and hitherto entirely secret "retirement package" (personal use of a corporate 747, his own apartment in Trump Towers including catered food and flowers, and much else, all of it lifelong and irrevocable except with Mr. Welch's consent) hit the press. You might say I felt somewhat betrayed by this...
Immelt, the CEO of GE, tried to portray this as all being perfectly fine and appropriate, and not at all excessive. Once the public outrage got too hot, the board hurriedly rescinded this platinum handshake and claimed "All fixed now, no ethical issues at all. Nothing to see here, folks, move along."
Let's see, I get punished if I don't fly the very cheapest route on company travel, regardless of the cost to my personal life, and a retired exec gets FREE use of a WHOLE 747 for his PERSONAL use whenever he feels like it? And THAT is considered ethical conduct?
That's MY beef with Mr. Immelt. Any questions?
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Woops
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The whole thing would be moot if anybody bothered to implement CD-Text
Were that I say, pancakes?
For amusement's sake, I quote from the Wikipedia entry on Slander and Libel:
"the defendant may claim that the allegedly defamatory statement is not actually capable of being defamatory--an insulting statement that does not actually harm someone's reputation is prima facie not libelous."
* Slander is spoken, libel recorded. You wonder why everyone thinks you're a twit and doesn't take your opinion seriously, oftentimes it's because you don't know what you're talking about-- in this case, that being the difference between libel and slander.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
You should read the wikipedia entry on libel.
I mean, it plainly says that a libelous statement must be made knowing it to be false or with reckless disregard for the truth. Seriously, does anyone have reason to believe that Mr. Scherf _didn't_ do those things? Was there 'willful and wanton' disregard for the truth? (What truth? Seems like it could only be willful and wanton disregard if you knew he didn't do those things.)
So yeah, I'd defend that suit for fun, wouldn't you?
Anne Coulter is a man. I read it on the internet.
The history of the Gracenote article is a big edit war between two completely different versions of the article which are both being incrementally updated along the way. See some examples.
One version is the original (and current) article starting with the wording "Gracenote is a commercial enterprise". The other version (starting with "Gracenote is a company") is being maintained by a group of users who are presumably related to Gracenote (ie Steve Scherf and Gracenote employees/friends).
I thought the best approach to correcting an article you don't agree with on Wikipedia was to make or suggest small incremental edits. Outright changing virtually the entire content of an article over and over and accusing others of vandalism along the way is kinda petty.
Steve: if you want to write your own article on the history of Gracenote as you see it, put it up on Gracenote's website or your own personal website. I'm sure no one would have a problem with Wikipedia linking to your article so they can include all points of view.
".. many Wikipedia contributors either use their real name, or if they use a handle give their real name on their user page." Correct. Mine's 'John R. User'
analog < infinite binary (Heisenberg is with me on this one)
... did anyone bother looking at the revision history for the wikipedia entry? did the slashdot editors before they posted this drivel?
Shadus
(1) Depends on the country (US is more permissive, EU is more protective as far as sweat of the brow compilations are concerned)
(2) If the arrangement or selection process is creative then there is usually protection as well.
Be careful before starting to copy databases.
Isn't the CDDB data still available? Multiple posters here claim to have downloaded it so I'm not sure what you are complaining about.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but I really don't understand this controversy at all. As long as Gracenote specified that they were assuming the copyright over contributions their terms of use were no different than pretty much ANY online forum or corporate website. And it isn't as if they tried to revoke their earlier license, they just changed the way they treated new contributions after a certain point.
If people feel that contributing data to a commercial project is somehow abusing them, that is their perogative. But then they should either not contribute, or put their money where their mouths are and contribute their own cash and labour to create the infrastructure necessary to enable alternate collaboration. If it isn't already happening, this is probably because it is unreasonable to expect someone to do it all free of charge.
Personally, I'm really happy every time a free software product or service manages to produce a commercial application which earns the people who started it enough to feed themselves, and continue to produce materials I can use. Bagging on a guy who contributed a lot to a free project because he doesn't want to continuously work for free is selfish. If Linus wanted to work on a commercial Unix, I wouldn't hold it against the man simply because he has been a major force in the open source world.
He who controls the past controls the future.
He who controls Wikipedia controls the past.
Is there some sort of program to read wikipedia and then choose to filter out certain editor's additions from the articles? It would be kind of weird to see what it would look like without some of the obsessive revert war type of people.
And you are a proud example of fucking incomprehensible grammar.
The remedy for that is to learn grammer, dumbass.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I'm sure that I'll be labeled a troll, but wikipedia cares exactly as much about fact as it's authors do, which is to say much less than they should. I'm not suggesting that it is filled with out-and-out lies (although I'm sure there are some of those too) but it's chock full of spin.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
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
Too much of a coward to sign your name, and you call ME a loser? Hahahahaha!
Dog is my co-pilot.
Will the history interested in what someone writes on Wikipedia? See my cartoon. Bye, Oliver
Hey man, chill out. Since you didn't take notice, I did acknowledge that in this case, karma whoring does not come into it. If you're in doubt of this, please just go back and reread my post. I promise it is in there. I checked just now for good measure.
The reason I responded to your comment and not to the umpteen hundred other posts with some "Oh please merciful moderators don't mod me down" crap in them is that yours just happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back, to use the cliche.
I have absolutely no problem with the post being modded above 0. AS I SAID, since you didn't actually bother to read my post, I found the original post interesting, and would have modded it informative. I liked it. It was a good, informative comment. More of that is what slashdot needs. However, I do have a problem with whining about mod points for the sole purpose of getting mod points. It is a cheap trick, does not contribute to the actual quality of the post in the slightest, and it is just plain annoying. If a post deserves mod points, then it will get them. If it does not deserve mod points, then it will not get them. However, oftentimes, worthless posts with mod point whining will get modded up because it puts the mods on a guilt trip. I don't want to read worthless posts!
Oh, and if you or anyone else has a problem with their comments starting at 0, then REGISTER! Nothing is forcing you to stay an AC. Don't bitch about something that is completely within your power to change. Although, if this latest post is the kind of rubbish you more typically spew, you'd pretty quickly pick up negative karma, and I wouldn't have to read it anyway.
I'm not the one who called it ADD, btw. Using ADD in that sense SEVERELY pisses me off because it cheapens ADD and removes credibility from those of us who actually have been diagnosed with ADD by a competent physician.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Why? Because Gracenote's history is one of unethical and spiteful behaviour. I've had the extreme misfortune of being on a project in the past which involved using the "technology" your Company licenses, and as such I witnesses first hand what was going on. You know what? It ties up exactly with the rest of the comments here.
What you tried to pull off was this:
What don't you understand? Are you that distanced from reality? You screwed a LOT of people, a LOT of companies and now you come back claiming that all this stuff never happened? Legally, what you did was dubious but never got you on the wrong side of the law. So what. Legal != Ethical. Don't fall back on faulty logic - we can all see straight through it.
What your company did has earned you a future where nobody wants anything to do with you. You can't go up to random companies and threaten them legally and expect them to be friends when that legal ruling turns against you... as happened with Musicmatch. Looking forward to hearing about your bankruptcy.
My name is in my email address. Most people with above-room-temerature IQs noticed that...
Dog is my co-pilot.