Gracenote has written an open letter defending the suit it has
launched against Roxio as well as its actions in charging licensing
fees for the CDDB database in general. The company says “It’s not
about data, it’s about intellectual property.”
Steve Scherf and Ti Kan created CDDB in 1995 and wrote
every line of code. Steve Scherf is, and has always been, the chief
architect and a founder of CDDB Inc, now doing business as
Gracenote. Although the raw data is user submitted, the storage,
retrieval, categorization, and organization of the database, the
access interface, and the matching and filtering methods are
absolutely proprietary, and we will do what is necessary to defend
this intellectual property.