Flutterby™! : Gracenote under pressure 2001-05-14 00:43:56+00

Gracenote under pressure

2001-05-14 00:43:56+00 by Dan Lyke 15 comments

Via Hack The Planet: Gracenote under pressure. I need to do a little bit of research, but I do need to clarify my feelings on this matter, especially the patent issues which aren't delved into in this article, because there are some career choice impacts here...

I think maybe the lesson to this might be to never rely on anything that starts out as "free" to remain free.

I don't have problems with charging for access to the servers, but I'm wondering what patents Gracenote is claiming on their "music recognition inventions", and any reference to the DMCA instantly tweaks my warning bells.

I don't know the history of FreeDB, but I'm also wondering about the claims that FreeDB

stole copyrighted material. I need to look at the history of that a little.

I'm poking through the FreeDB database and... well... a quick random sample does show a whole lot of stuff processed by CDDB so from a copyright standpoint there are definitely issues leaning in favor of CDDB

Gracenote has no claim to the original set of facts or their formatting, as they were explicitly free (GPL'ed, in fact). Gracenote decided that making money off the work of dupes who thought they were supporting a free project coughIMDBcough was a swell idea and forked the database by relicensing it and making the database that thousands of contributors had entrusted to them private. Both the data and format that existed at the instant they relicensed are perpetually freely available, as the GPL does not go away.

(the copyright owner, and only the owner, can make new versions under a new license, but whatever was distributed prior to the relicensing cannot be reeled back in or have its further distribution curtailed by the original copyright owner. The lack of this is what open-source true believers HATE about Apple's "open" license.)

Furthermore, current US copyright law does not protect the facts in databases, only their formatting. Typing in the contents of Verizon's white pages and selling the results is explicitly legal and protected (this is where PhoneDisc came from, literally). It would be illegal to scan all the pages and sell those results as that would also capture the formatting, which can be copyright protected. So the presence of CD facts from Gracenote's post-fork version would not mean that Gracenote was having it's rights violated.

So what, then, are the alleged patent and copyright violations mentioned in Gracenote's press release?

I've no objection at all to Gracenote asking for a fee, and I'm even okay with the license restriction that says that if future versions of the software use a different service then Gracenote gets to make all your old software go boom (not a good way to make friends, but that's a business decision, not an ethical one).

> So what, then, are the alleged patent and copyright violations mentioned in Gracenote's press release?

> I'm even okay with the license restriction that says that if future versions of the software use a different service then Gracenote gets to make all your old software go boom

I don't know enough about the legal definitions to say for sure but that certainly has the appearance of an anti-competitive tactic to me.

Alright, I'm guessing here but I believe the patents have to do with the method of identifying the CD, not the actual database itself.

I'm not a smart dawg, and I don't mean to speak ill of potential employers, but to my untutored eye "using the disc table of contents as an index key" hardly seems worthy of a 25 year monopoly...

well, from doing a patent search on CDDB at www.patents.ibm.com, the earliest filing is in 97. Now barring a rejection/refile from a previous date, it would appear to me that unless CDDB went active after jan 96, most of these patents are unenforcable and should not of been granted. IIRC, CDDB was around at least as far back as 94, but I could be off. And at that time the methods used by CDDB were fairly common knowledge. So baring that they filed for a patent that was not granted for some reason and therefore refiled with a narrower view, it would appear that the USPO made a mistake in granting these patents in the first place.

There's a reason I kept looking after Ticketmaster offered me a fat wad of cash to work for them.

Plus, if I were you, I'd be very dubious of Gracenote's mid-term viability. Relatable, Cantametrix and others are making their service more and more irrelevant everyday. CD's may continue to be an important distribution vector for years, but for how long will they be the major playback format in networked devices?

...and respectable companies did eventually match and even exceed TM's offer, btw.

You folks did see the mealy-mouthed followup from Gracenote, right? Pure, unadulterated weasel-speak.

Well, as much as I'm against software patents, if they're just claiming monopoly on their techniques for reconciling and ranking entries that's really no worse than Pixar's "if you use pseudo-random sequences in computer graphics we own your ass" patent or any of the numerous other overly broad and ill-advised patents out there.

And it's fairly clear that the FreeDB folks aren't paying a million and a half a year in Oracle license fees, so any claims of software copyright infringement are pretty much moot.

"Yet, unbeknownst to most people, Kan included in the code for XMCD commands to append copyright notices on [other] people's submissions. Kan did not answer repeated requests for comment, so it's unknown when the copyright notice was added and how visible it was to users of the system. But Gracenote has claimed that about 100,000 records were copyrighted by Kan and that copyright was then transferred."