“…It gets better, of course. Assuming you have figured out a
way to create software and distribute it without garnering any
source of revenue at all, something I don’t think even the
staunchest FSF advocates could do, you can get permission to access
the CDDB data free-of-charge. There just is one, tiny, little
catch: you can’t let your application access any other online music
database, such as FreeDB or CDIndex.”
“This exclusivity clause, which is present in both the
commercial and noncommercial licenses, is the salt rubbed in the
wounds of anyone who ever contributed to the original CDDB
database. You can figure out why the clause is there, of course:
Gracenote does not want end-users to populate their local CD
information databases with CDDB information, and then turn around
and access something like FreeDB and upload the information there.
And they want the end-user tied to their database so they can start
delivering specialized content to those users on behalf of their
partners.”
“Again, not bad for a formerly public database.”