Robert Lemos

It’s amazing that five years after it sued Roxio, Gracenote is still dealing with the act of taking private a database built using user submissions. The latest news: After an interview giving his side of the story, Gracenote founder Steve Scherf apparently is editing Wikipedia to take out objectionable (and he argues, inaccurate) content.

I wrote about the history of Gracenote in my May 2001 special report Access Denied for CNET News.com.

When it was first created by programmer Ti Kan in 1993, the CDDB was a part of XMCD, Kan’s application for playing CDs on Unix-like operating systems. At that time, the program didn’t use the Internet. It merely saved the CD information to the computer on which the software ran.

Within a couple of years, with the help of buddy Steve Sherf, Kan quickly created a system for taking track information entered by an individual and uploading it to a database on the Internet. If someone placed a CD known to the database in his or her computer, the player could download the information from the online database, saving the person the few minutes it would take to type in the information.

Sherf is credited for most of the work on the CD database component of the system. “Ti and I worked together for years,” said Sherf, now chief architect for Gracenote. “While he invented XMCD, he was only interested in writing his program. I made the service myself and wrote the code.”

Without people submitting song titles to the database, the CDDB would be only marginally useful. Kan, long a supporter of Free Software, released the source code of his program under the GNU General Public License. Such a license gives people the right to modify and use the software as long as the source code of the application is released under the GPL.

With the code–and many assumed, the data–released as a public resource, submissions to the CD database took off.

Protection for the database was a point of contention. One that led music software maker Roxio to break with using Gracenote’s CDDB and attempting to use another project, FreeDB. Gracenote sued Roxio:

Today, few laws protect a database. While two bills aimed at protecting a collection of data are wending their way through Congress, companies with proprietary databases typically rely on copyright to protect their archives of data.

In the past, the protection has only been granted for data organized in a way that is considered “original.” Yet, the creator of the database doesn’t have to be Picasso, said David Marglin, general counsel for Gracenote.

“If your arrangement of facts (has) even a small modicum of originality you can get a copyright on your arrangement,” he said, adding that in Gracenote’s case, the company’s CD database has originality that extends beyond the fact that people have submitted to the archive.

In January 2002, the companies came to a settlement, which appears to have had Roxio licensing the content from Gracenote–and thus, adding legal muscle to future IP claims by Gracenote.