More on the Gracenote/Roxio lawsuit regarding the use of the
CDDB database, which Gracenote owns. For those just joining the
story, the issue with Gracenote’s ownership of a database populated
over the years by vounteers. Gracenote is currently involved in a
lawsuit with Roxio over the latter’s use of other online databases.
This article gets into some background detail, including the
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s involvement and the fact
Gracenot’s suit could prevent other developers from moving to open
source alternatives.
“The most egregious part of this lawsuit is that the
company has taken the public’s work and propertized it,” said Robin
Gross, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which
fights for public rights on the Internet.Furthermore, Gracenote’s copyright is backed with a software
patent, which in some part gives the company a lock on the
organization of such a database.”