Dear CDDB Users: Thanks For Helping The RIAA!

A reader unblessed with a name writes: "I'll admit that when Gracenote took over the CDDB compact-disc database, I wasn't too annoyed. Now I am. Napster has just signed an agreement with them to use Gracenote's services, and by extension the community-built CDDB databases, to implement its copyright blocking."

Re:Can one fool apps into using FreeDB instead?

Yes, at least on NT. edit %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts .

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Flamebait?

Too bad I don't have moderator points today. Can I moderate an entire article as "Flamebait"?

Look people, I know there are a lot of GNU zealots here that buy into the party line, "Information wants to be free!" So the CDDB database gets used by the Bad Guys. So what? That's the price you pay for freely exchanging information -- Someone else is free to use it against you!

Okay, so CDDB is no longer "free" in the GNU sense. That's beside the point. Do you think they're so naïve that they're not also using FreeDB as well? The only reason you know about the Napster/CDDB deal is that they had to sign a license to use the database and someone thought it would be good PR to announce it publicly. I'll betcha a dollar, though, that they also have their hooks into FreeDB and any other GPL'd free-as-in-liberty databases out there.

Freedom is a double-edged sword. You can't grab the moral high ground waving the "Information is Free!" flag, then complain when people use it for the "wrong purposes". That ain't freedom. It's a license agreement.

Chelloveck

Can CDDB identify things per-track, then?

As I understood it the CDDB identified track names based on the overall signature of a CD, including its ID number and the lengths of all the tracks. How can this be used to identify individual MP3 tracks? And, if it is possible, why do we not have a tool which fills in the ID3 tags for totally unlabelled MP3 files, just from the CDDB. This would be very useful. Surely if this were possible, it would have been done?!

All CDDB-listed titles are copyright?

How can they be sure that everything on the CDDB is copyrighted? I'm sure that probably most of it is, but not ALL of it. Plus, as anyone who uses CDDB knows, the database is far from accurate, awash with typos and sometimes just outright mistakes.

Still, how long before someone makes a Napster plugin to check your MP3s against CDDB and rename them in subtle ways so that they no longer match?

FreeDB

those of you that are still using CDDB, and are fed up with them charging for community added content, switch to Freedb.org [freedb.org]. It's not gonna up and sell the database.
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The real moral is stay under the radar

The real moral is not sharing is for losers, but when ever you do something that the higher ups (ie your employer, the RIAA, the government) might look askance at, try to stay under the radar.

For example, LSD was legal and unknown until the media got ahold of it, in 1965-66.

The Grateful Dead were a great party until MTV's Day of the Dead in 1987.

Porn was free and unblocked by corporate networks in 1996.

I imagine that divx;) sites are going to get targeted next.

I understand your frustration

Many of you devoted time and effort to contributing to the CDDB database. It hurts to see your work used in a way you didn't want.

Yet, you take the work of musicians and distribute and use it against their expressed wished. How is this any different? You both put time and energy into creating something intangible, and you both were denied its control.

You weren't robbed of the information itself, after all. If you wanted to keep a copy of the information that you submitted to CDDB, it would've been a trivial matter to make a backup. No, you were robbed of nothing.

If you use Napster to download copyrighted material and feel ripped off by the CDDB, then you are an utterly despicable hypocrite.

- qpt

Rebuild it and rebuild it better

I know this will be posted 50 times to this thread, but here it is again anyway: http://freedb.org/ [freedb.org]. We're rebuilding it, we're rebuilding it better, and cddb can stew in its immoral juices.
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Re:All CDDB-listed titles are copyright?

IANAL for another few months yet.

However, I can tell you that every work of art, published or not, created after 1978 is copyrighted by someone.

I'm not a lawyer either. But if you're heading toward becoming a lawyer, it might behoove you to get in the habit of speaking more carefully and precisely about legal matters, for the time when you are a lawyer. I know your point was about copyright existing with or without registration, but you neglected another possibility.

Your blanket statement above is incorrect, because there are some works created after 1978 to which nobody holds a copyright. Of course, those works started out as copyrighted, but the authors relinquished the copyrights by explicitly placing those works in the public domain. Yes, the vast majority of works created after 1978 are still under copyright, but not every work. While I'm sure you were aware of it, and this wasn't legal advice, you might want to be more careful when the time comes that you are dispensing legal advice. If I'm not mistaken, that's when you can incur liability for any mistakes you make. (That's right, isn't it?)

(For the benefit of those who haven't studied the law, I do know this much: "public domain" is a very specific legal term meaning "not copyrighted"; those who call any freely-redistributable software "public domain" are misusing a specific legal term.)

But hey, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not studying to become one either. Feel free to ignore my opinion. Maybe an actual lawyer could weigh in with a more relevant opinion here...

Apart from this nitpicking, I thought your post was very interesting. :-)

Re:I understand your frustration

Point one:

Making an MP3 for me to use it in my Nomad Jukebox is not against the wishes of the Artist.

Point two:

Many artists don't have a problem with this. In fact some artists openly encourage spreading of MP3s. It is mostly record companies and BIG music stars that have problems.

Point three:

People DO lose something. What was the purpose of sending it to CDDB otherwise? Why did they do it? It was not a nessesary step to get the MP3 in the end.

Point four:

I agree with you fully.
:)
Just wanted to make SOME points clear.
You obviously are playing devil's advocate, and so am I.

Re:I understand your frustration

Napster users aren't taking someone else's music and then selling it back to them. Whereas the CDDB is taking the result of other people's labor -- a database rather than music tracks -- and selling it back to them. And now, also using it against the people and the activity that created that database in the first place.

I see a difference, once I look past the superficial similarities.



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Re:The real moral is stay under the radar

Porn was free and unblocked by corporate networks in 1996.

And God only knows, it's hard to find porn on the Internet nowadays without a credit card.

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"You owe me a case of beer. Sucka'."

This is a GOOD thing...

Alert: this is not a troll!

All that has happened, basically, is Napster asked permission to use the database, and got that permission. Of course they pay for it's use, which is good. Thus, the company has no excuse to let individuals pay for their services: the costs will already be covered.

CDDB is a public database(sort of). Napster wants to use that database to prevent the illegal copying of music. Of course a lot of moral issues are involved. Should all music be free/Free? Is the RIAA's greed justifiable? Is copying music wrong or right? Who owns information? Etc.

The issue here is none of our business. A company using data from a _public_ database to control the use over it's _own_ application, is up to them. They don't claim to own the information. They just use the information which they have access to. What they do with it is up to them.

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Sure if napster is king...

But napster is not king. Opennap for example gives you 100% of the functionality of Napster without having to deal with the RIAA.. yet. There will always be up-and-down servers, etc.. but thats alright. The list of servers right now is centralized with Napigator, but how hard would it be to reverse engineer the napigator ? Damn easy..

I put up a opennap server on my cable modem one night.. within 2 days I had over 300 users using the server and 250GB of songs indexed on my system.

RIAA is nothing more than a speed-bump... honestly I think it's the best thing to happen to push people out of using a centralized and corparation controlled service.

RIAA may of made their worst mistake by not settling something a bit more reasonable with Napster.. it's going to push people to other avenues. (No, I am NOT talking about Gnutella... ) I can see the RIAA board all start laughing when they talk about gnutella as a threat.

anyway...




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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?

Re:Can CDDB identify things per-track, then?

CDDB gets used by ripping programs to name the mp3s when they are taken from the CD in the first place, so that information is available then.

What Napster will be doing is working on the principle that the CDDB track name database is a big old list for working out what rippers would have named files.

Stop whining

Napster Alternatives [infoanarchy.org]
CatNap filename encryption proxy [infoanarchy.org]
Daily news on P2P / file sharing [infoanarchy.org]

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I think it went more like this:

RIAA: Here is a list of 150,000 songs that we want you to block. You have 3 days.
*THUD*

Napster Admin: OK.

*2 days later, Napster Admin wakes up from a hangover*

Napster Admin: That was some party, hey? Oh shit. The RIAA thing. Holy Mother of Perl! I don't want to mess with typing or OCRing all that in!

*an idea forms...*

Is it just me?

Or does this seem strange...

Napster - A database of Song Names - ordered by the courts to remove the song names

GraceNote - A database of Song Names - helping Napster to remove the Song Names.

Re:This gives me an idea

No, no, no! Please do NOT screw up the CDDB! They're providing a good service to individuals and any companies who want to pay for a license. Napster happened to be one of 'em. Don't make the CDDB useless for all of the other purposes just to get your revenge against Napster trying to survive.

Can one fool apps into using FreeDB instead?

If I monkey with /etc/hosts (or whatever the Winduhs equivalent is), can I silently redirect *.cddb.org to my choice of freedb mirrors without causing undue pain and hardship on myself?

Re:Flamebait?

Okay, so CDDB is no longer "free" in the GNU sense. That's beside the point.

But that's exactly the point - people submitted information on the understanding that it would continue to be freely available to all, and now it's not. I don't think many people would have a problem with Gracenote operating under the same terms as Red Hat, for example - anybody can grab RH Linux and sell it. But even though I submitted info to CDDB on the understanding that it was a free, open, and redistributable database, now I can't grab my own copy and distribute it. It's the change from "free" to "non-free" that is the big issue. The fact that the information is available for use by everyone, including the RIAA, doesn't come as a surprise and is really a logical next step.

I'll betcha a dollar, though, that they also have their hooks into FreeDB and any other GPL'd free-as-in-liberty databases out there.

Good point - I hadn't thought of that but it isn't really surprising. I suppose their welcome to it - I'm willing to accept the consequences of a truly free database.

Copyright field in ID3v2 tag

For those unsure of how they propose to implement this:

There is a copyright field in the newer ID3v2 tad info.

Since the CDDB was a community based system, it would thus rely on the people ripping it to enter the correct information. There is also a field which specifies: "Encoded by".

These fields are all good and well, but it will take a lot of time and effort for them to verify these.

:)

The real moral is "licenses matter".

Sometimes those who say "I don't like to use or contribute to that piece of software, because although it's free beer, I don't like the license" get accused of whining: "hey, it's free, if you don't like it don't use it but don't whine about it". The real lesson to draw from this is that licenses *do* matter and it's worthwhile discussing what we want out of them.
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Re:Flamebait?

Too bad I don't have moderator points today. Can I moderate an entire article as "Flamebait"?

I would have modded it up as "Funny".

Of course Napster is going to get its info from wherever it can find it. Hell, the RIAA can give them the list of all song names, authors, albums, etc, etc. Napster could take its data from FreeDB, but it would not be as funny. After all, FreeDB give free information, for the good and the evil.

The CDDB steal data from people that were riping CDS to put the on Napster which now sleeps with RIAA and uses the very data those people typed in and can't have free access to, to prevent them access to the song they ripped.

It's... marvelous. Really. It is a splendid shortcut of what the net have become.

Cheers,

--fred

Re:All CDDB-listed titles are copyright?

> the database is far from accurate

True, but most people who rip their CDs get the names from CDDB, so it has the exact mistakes that the RIAA is looking for.

"You Used To Be Cool": An open letter to Napster

Man, Napster, you used to be so cool. But what happened to you? The minute the heat is on you, you up and rat on everyone.

One day I'm "sharing" tracks with "friends" I've never met. The next day, I'm "stealing." What the hell happened to you, Napster?

This reminds me of that guy we all knew in high school who used to let us borrow his car all the time. Sure he was friendly when we were hanging around and borrowing his car. But once we crashed it into a tree, he wasn't very friendly anymore.

Everything was cool when you were cool, Napster. Remember? We were all having fun until the cops came a'knocking. Hell, half the stuff I stole I didn't even like.

Well, I've gotta go shave my donkey ears. [ridiculopathy.com]

Unfair

I hope this isn't blanket blocking.

I have material to which I own the copyright which is entered into the CDDB.

So now I'm blocked from distributing my own music over napster because someone who bought a CD typed the information into Napster?

Hopefully the record industries will have to supply a full CD signature to CDDB and then they block all tracknames with a matching signature.

Now is the time for independent producer to make albums with identical CDDB signatures to RIAA music.