Can the work of a community of volunteers originally offered for free be turned into a paying service that requires a user license?
Database company Gracenote, which stores song and artist information for CDs, thinks so. The Berkeley, Calif.-based company went so far as to file a lawsuit against a firmed that dropped its product for another volunteer-maintained database that was free.
Gracenote's action has prompted a backlash against the company. Particularly vocal are those people who have participated in building the company's archive of music information, which they saw as a labor of love.
"Gracenote is taking that freely given data and is requiring users [commercial developers] to pay to retrieve it now," said Virginia Tech information technology specialist Robert Sebek in an -mail interview. "If you have a contact at Gracenote, please ask how I get my share of the licensing fee for the data I uploaded."
Last week, Berkeley-based Gracenote sued Roxio, maker of the most popular CD-burning software, for switching to a free database operated by some of the people who helped build Gracenote's original database. Gracenote claims patent and trademark infringement, as well as breach of contract.
Roxio executives said the lawsuit is without merit. "Roxio believes this unfounded claim was made by Gracenote in response to our selection of their competition as our preferred provider," Bill Growney, director of legal affairs at Roxio, said in a statement.
Gracenote spokeswoman Sue Ellen Schaming dismissed the criticism. "We run it [the database], we manage it. It's all our engineers and servers. It's like Epinions or eGroups. We have to make a living."
Gracenote's music recognition database was originally released in 1998 under an open-source license that allowed users to freely modify and distribute it. The database was built by thousands of volunteers, many music buffs, who manually added data on artists and song titles to its listings.
Using Gracenote's database, the tracks of CDs are given specific song titles, rather than the generic "Track 1" or "Track 2" used in standard digital music files.
After an initial run as freeware on college servers, responsibility for the CDDB database and its underlying technology was taken over by Gracenote.com, which licenses digital music management technology to AOL Time Warner and other companies that provide music delivery services. Gracenote has acquired six patents related to searching for specific music in the database and synchronizing music playback.
When Gracenote began to require users of the database to sign license agreements, some of the people who helped build it created a similar database at Freedb.org using some of the same technology and data. Roxio switched to the Freedb.org database, which was available for the unbeatable price of free.
Freedb.org is not named in the lawsuit and Andrew Streib, a volunteer who helps maintain it, declined to comment on the lawsuit. Numerous online music listeners and programmers were not as restrained. Even if Gracenote wins its lawsuit, it has likely lost in the court of public opinion.
"Thousands of us who contributed track data to CDDB expecting to continue to have access to it are now cut off, even from our own work done in good faith," Vic Cromarty wrote in an e-mail. "I fully support Roxio in finding an alternative service."
The author of one of the original CD player applications that interfaced with CDDB not only questioned the ethics of Gracenote charging for something the community created, but questioned the validity of some of Gracenote's patents. He and others were working on the technology long before Gracenote's patents were issued, he said, declining to be identified because he is still a licensee of Gracenote's database.
A former subsidiary of storage access maker Adaptec, Roxio was spun out as a separate company and began trading publicly on the Nasdaq stock exchange Monday, where its stock price was $14.40.
