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Gracenote Defends Its Evolution
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Nov 13, 2006 10:20 AM
from the well-straighter-anyway dept.
from the well-straighter-anyway dept.
In the beginning was a music recognition database called CDDB, and it was good. Now, people accuse Gracenote of stealing its success. CDDB and Gracenote architect Steve Scherf sets the record straight.
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Your Rights Online: Gracenote Founder Rewriting History At Wikipedia 201 comments
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."
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Very bizarre outcry from the techies... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never really understood why people are angry at GraceNote. If you put information out into the world, expect others to copy it. Expect some to take it and make it profitable. Expect someone to get some gain out of it that you might not be able to or even want.
Yes, there are various State-run ways to try to protect content or ideas (copyright, trademarks, patent, etc). These are useless for everyone but the ultra-powerful who can afford to litigate copyright infringement. Don't believe me? Try to battle someone copying your music, art or words.
My own sites ALL repudiate copyright -- I release it into the public domain, and even tell people to stick their own name on it. I make my profit two ways: I gain incredible information from the replies on slashdot or on my blogs or forums (that's free information from you to me), and I leverage that information into my "real life" of consulting and speaking engagements.
If you reply on slashdot, theoretically you own the content of your post. But how many people take your post and use it to form their own opinion? Who owns the newly formed opinions? In my mind, no one, ever. Sure, you may have submitted some CD information to CDDB, but who is to say that the information is unique to you -- and even if it was, who cares what CDDB did with it if you gave it away freely. Even if you put a restriction on it, how are you going to stop CDDB from changing its business model? If Linux all-of-a-sudden was ripped off completely by a big company and sold commercially, how would you fight it? With what funds?
What Grace Note did might seem mean or wrong, but I don't see a problem with it. People volunteer information for free all the time (see slashdot or any blog's comments). Other people use this and work hard to find value out of that information for others. It is the continued labor of working that is valuable to the market, not the one-time work that someone hopes to make repeated profits on.
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Personally I've yet to hear a single positive benefit to the public from the privitization of CDDB.
Why did people submit data to cddb? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I thought that I am submitting my data to the public. I thought that if I submit my data, so will others, and we'll have a public resource that everybody can use. But suddenly, that public resource turned private - I could not use it freely as before. They tricked me into giving them a resource, and then treated it as if it is their own property.
It is as if I gave a dollar to a public project - say a server to run slashdot on, thinking that if everybody contributed a dollar to that resource, then the public will have a resource - slashdot will have a fast server. And then slashdot suddenly turned around, took the $100k that people contributed, added another $100k from their own money, and said that now you can only access slashdot under certain conditions.
It is true that what they did was legal, but I think it was highly unethical. They for sure tricked me out of 5 minutes of my time.
Parent
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There's a lesson to be learned -- when you share your information, expect others to take advantage of it if they can find a way to make a gain that doesn't hurt you. You admit you spent a whopping 5 minutes submitting something for others to use. Someone decided to use it. The information that you submitted is probably still there in FreeDB, or was perfected by someone else. It doesn't go away.
Gracenote decided they had to move CDDB from a public resource to a private one
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The part in bold is the part you're not getting.
The information that you submitted is probably still there in FreeDB, or was perfected by someone else. It doesn't go away.
Actually, some did. A lot of user-contributed content had to be replaced as a result, and it's not clear that all of it ever has been.
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All the CDDB data that users contributed was *locked up* by Gracenote. You seem to be thinking that Gracenote started selling freely available content, but you are wrong. They took what everyone *assumed* to be freely available content, locked it up, and started charging people for it.
Many people contributed to CDDB under the assumption that it was a p
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If you mean the free market is all about misrepresentation, then you are exactly right. By the time the free market catches up with them, they'll have made a tidy sum off all of those who mistakenly thought it was a cooperative effort.
Re:Why did people submit data to cddb? (Score:4, Informative)
I see something ethically wrong with one thing Gracenote has done.
Gracenote has sued other companies (such as Roxio) that have used FreeDB, saying Gracenote owns software patents to CD-identifying technology. That so many people worked to contribute to a freely-available resource, only to have that resource closed and then have the closer use lawsuits to attempt to stifle competition came as a slap in the face. Now, this was five years ago, and maybe Gracenote has behaved themselves since then, but after that I chose to use FreeDB instead.
And no, Gracenote did not "release the database to the FreeDB," FreeDB copied a two-year-old mirror that had been made before Gracenote was formed, before it closed the database. Gracenote's position has been that the data was owned by them. In fact, they used the arguement that XMCD added copyright tags to each submission setting the copyright to the CDDB maintainer, copyrights which then passed to Gracenote when they were formed and said maintainer was an employee.
Parent
Re:Why did people submit data to cddb? (Score:5, Interesting)
If they had announced ahead of time "please contribute to our database, and eventually we will change the access rights so that only qualified clients can access the database.", I am not sure that I and other people would have contributed our time (i.e. money) to them. (and I mean client in the sense of computer program, not customer).
Parent
Re:Why did people submit data to cddb? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why did people submit data to cddb? (Score:5, Informative)
So, you may not pay money yourself, but that doesn't mean that money is not changing hands in order for you to be able to use that feature.
Q.
Parent
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Not only that; the fact that Gracenote also sued customers who tried to switch to CDDB, as well as their attempts to hinder any and all competition through frivolous patent trolls suits drew a rather seedy picture.
The guy in tfa may not have had anything to do with it, and the people responsible for those actions may be gone, but a fact that behooves any profit-at-all-costs buisnessmen to remember before pissing everyone off
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follow the links or
http://download.wikimedia.org/ [wikimedia.org]
The very content they'd lock up under fees is currently downloadable so if what you "propose" happens then things boil down to two questions: who's got the latest dump and who's gonna host it? It's all GFDL (ignore the whole image/fair use thing) so there's nothing legally there for wikimedia foun
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Wikipedia could even have it set to logged in users don't see ads or have an opt-in ads system. Instead what I see are dozens of sites which copy wikipedia content, add ads and make it more difficult to search Google (Google is less relevant if 5 of the top 20 searches are just rehashed wikipedia articles further down the list).
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I think you still have a valid reason to gripe, but I don't think it was the reason you gave. All of the public submissions are still freely available to the public which means your were not tricked out of
Are you sure data is available? (Score:2)
Can you maybe give a link to where the data can be downloaded freely? Is it used by freedb?
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Your error... (Score:2)
Because I thought that I am submitting my data to the public.
And you did submit it to the public, as the information is still available. Is this not true?
But suddenly, that public resource turned private - I could not use it freely as before.
There's a difference between the information you submitted, and the service to provide that information to your music player. It's your error in not seperating those two different things. You seemed to assume an agreement that never existed based upon some idea of "w
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As for influencing opinions, I hardly think even the most fascistic copyright fanatics in the RIAA, MPAA, or BSA would argue that a changed opinion is a derivative work.
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From the article... (Score:4, Insightful)
How can the company be adequately defending itself if these pleasant comments are coming from a guy who's not really in charge at all? Having read the article, I have some respect for this employee, but it hardly means that Gracenote the firm no longer merits blame.
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Still, the cruxt of the complaint is that we (yes, I've submitted data to CDDB) submitted data, for free, for the world to use, and now CDDB/Gracenote is closed....
Or is it? You read the article... he implies that all that data that was entered for free is still freely available.
What's there to set straight? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah right, so the community had to duplicate a lot of the work that was "donated" to CDDB, while Gracenote profited from it without giving back. His point that the data before CDDB went commercial can still be downloaded is flawed; we're interested in what happened *after* you took all that hard work that you got for free and started charging for it. Besides, that's not "giving back"; that's "whee, we're making a boatload of money here, but hey, have some leftovers of the WORK YOU DID FOR US which we happened to leave behind!".
That's ok, I think the community did a good-faith effort and look how things turned out. I'd say no hard feelings, but I also don't think CDDB can expect a lot of community support or understanding in the future, pretexts and explanations nonwithstanding.
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I may be wrong but it sounds like everything they got for free is still freely available and had anyone else at the time wanted to do what they did with the data they would have been able to.
The fact that, apparently, this didn't happen and Gracenote went on to build a profitable business seems perfectly reasonable to me.
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The gift is a blessing to the giver (Score:2, Insightful)
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So I share something with you in good faith, you turn around and now try to charge me for the very thing I gave you, *I* am the one in the wrong because I am upset with your actions???
If you ask me to pass you a knife at the dinner table, you're damned right I expect you not to stab me in the back with it. I don't think things like this need to be spelled out in contract ah
Flawed analogy (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not about giving or sharing cookies.
In my neighborhood, a bunch of parents got together recently and donated a bunch of money to upgrade a schoolyard playground beyond what the local government would have put there by default. Now let's pretend the school is a private company. If we follow your line of reasoning, it would then be just fine for the school to sell the new playground to the highest bidder?
My answer is: of course not. Yes, the school would have the legal right to sell the play
You can't copy money. (Score:2)
In my neighborhood, a bunch of parents got together recently and donated a bunch of money to upgrade a schoolyard playground beyond what the local government would have put there by default.
The analogy breaks down because information can be copied, but money can't. Also money is a fluid resource that can buy other resources.
It's be more like your community got together and bought sand, tires, playground equipment, etc to build a playground. A private company decided to donate land to put the playground on
Was it good? (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone who has worked with CDDB would disagree. Jamie Zewinski provides a detailed summary [jwz.org] of its shortcomings. That someone steps forward as its "architect" makes me chuckle.
Jamie Zawinski... such a stupid astroturfer! (Score:2)
In another page in his site, he claims to have created an mp3 jukebox software, which is no longer maintained, and he recommends people to use iTunes instead. In other words, this Zawinski guy is nothing but
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But to tag the person who was instrumental in bringing us mozilla.org, XEmacs, and a load of other free software as somebody who "hates free software" is a statement that speaks of ignorance. You obviousl
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The REAL issue... (Score:2, Interesting)
You use Gracenote in your software, you're prevented by your license from allowing users to choose freedb.
That's suck turned up to 11.
What good is the original db being available, open, free if no one can realistically use it in the real world?
Don't bother... The questions are never answered. (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve: blah opnion blah done before Ti Kan blah.
Wired: To charge them for the data that they sent in? Doesn't that seem wrong?
Steve: blah blah investors market blah FreeDB still exists..
Wired: But you forced the community to produce FreeDB as a last-ditch resort. It was a needless duplication of a huge amount of work.
Steve: blah not greed blah GPL blah blah.
I read that whole smarmy article hoping that we'd finally get a decent answer. No dice. It's just a bunch of wandering by a guy who has gone to the McNamara school of interviewing ("don't answer the question you were asked, answer the question you wish you were asked"). But it's easy enough to counter this trick: just keep asking the question that you want answered.
Wired, you let him off the hook easy.
Re:Don't bother... The questions are never answere (Score:3, Insightful)
"We screwed our customers over big time, but it is perfectly legal so everything's fine. Also, we really don't care about investors either, and anything that goes wrong is their fault. We have a bad business model and are just trying to profit from other people's misery instead of innovating."
If he had actually answered the question truthfully he would have been fired.
Profit is ok, but screwing your supporters is not (Score:2, Informative)
I always wondered if it was based off my idea.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It worked with the Windows CD Player / Media Player application which identified CDs as long as the tracks and titles were in an INI file in your WINDOWS folder.
People would e-mail in their albums as text snippets and I would add them to the INI which users could download. There would be a new version practically every day.
It hit the buffers when the file got to 64K, which was the maximum size of an INI file in Windows 95 - then it had to start being partitioned and the need for a custom application became apparent.....
iTunes plays a big part as well (Score:2, Informative)
The fact that iTunes used CDDB (and they actually managed to engineer a different agreement that was better than what the rest of us developers had... probably because Apple paid Escient to do so) was what really ensured that F
It's a bit late, isn't it? (Score:2)
FreeDB sucks (everything is 'Folk'), but I'll take it over Gracenote any day.
he doesn't deny anything (Score:2)
Oh he can go sc3w himself... (Score:5, Informative)
FreeDB has had problems from day one because Gracenote sued companies who tried to use alternate lookup systems. They sued FreeDB at one point over the database's content and raised questions over patent ownership and copyright ownership of the database. They've been complete bastards and he can go F himself over a 100% disingenuous statement like the one above.
Steve who? (Score:3, Informative)
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There needs to be editing and moderation on the entries.
Most of the data looks like it was input by a 5-year-old hammering away on a Dvorak keyboard.
Another thing that annoys me is that even on Windows Media Player which buys in the CD track information from Muze and AMG, there is no consistency between those 2 companies on the formating of the track names. For instance, one company might have "(featuring Mya)" in the track name. Another might just add "Mya" to the Artist list against the