Gracenote Founder Rewriting History At Wikipedia

An anonymous reader writes "Gracenote founder Steve Scherf is busy again in his attempts to rewrite history after his recent interview at Wired. This time around he is aggressively deleting or seeking removal of any content on Wikipedia that discusses the controversy behind the commercialization of the formerly GPL'd cddb. Slashdotters may remember when cddb joined the Bad Patent Club back in 2000. Gracenote followed up by filing lawsuits against its customers for trying to switch to freedb and for alleged patent violations. Are there any Slashdotters out there who know the facts about Gracenote — its history, its business practices, its lawsuits? Wikipedia needs your help."

or

[by Anonymous Coward]

let them know how you feel by contacting them directly [gracenote.com]

Toll free?

[Lord Prox (521892)]

Is there a 1-800 toll free number available? I'd rather it be on there nickel than an in email.

I curse them [i-curse.com] and their little dog too. [i-curse.com]

Re:Toll free?

[stox (131684)]

If you're going to call toll-free, use a pay-phone. An extra $0.25 is tacked onto the bill to compensate the pay-phone operator for the use their phone for the call.

Re:Copyrights of the database entries?

[damiangerous (218679)]

Everything that you write, even a shopping list, automatically has your copyright

No, it doesn't [copyright.gov]. Just as a list of ingredients is not protected neither are facts. The manner of expression of those facts may be protected, but it certainly is not in the simple statement of "Album X by Band Y contains songs A, B, C and D" which is what the cddb is.

Re:Copyrights of the database entries?

[XoXus (12014)]

Everything that you write, even a shopping list, automatically has your copyright, ...

Not exactly - only if it is a creative, intellectual or artistic act. If you are just copying the track names off the back of a CD case, it is not any of those things.

Arguably, even a shopping list is not copyright, because it's hardly intellectual or artistic, and its creativity is disputable!

What a loaded question

[Timesprout (579035)]

Are there any Slashdotters out there who know the facts about Gracenote its history, its business practices, its lawsuits? Wikipedia needs your help."

Since when have the facts ever stopped slashdotters from throwing in their 2 cents on any subject?

Re:What a loaded question

[Mike1024 (184871)]

Since when have the facts ever stopped slashdotters from throwing in their 2 cents on any subject?

That may be true for you, but I can cite an established authority: wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. Did you know, for example, that:

Gracenote founder Steve Scherf has come a long way from his younder days of meth-fueled llama sodomizing. While once it looked like he'd soon die in a gutter, that six months he spent in the federal pen for killing a bussload of nuns while drunk (which he coyly refers to as "Happy happy shower butt fun time") cleaned him up, allowing him to become the ruthless corporate asshat we know today.

If Wikipedia says it, it must be true.

Re:What a loaded question

[interiot (50685)]

Technically, it's Wikipedia policy to delete libellous revisions from the page history, [1] [wikipedia.org] since it could be a legal issue. The same thing happened on the Seigenthaler page, as soon as Seigenthaler notified Wikipedia about the problem with his page, the libelous versions were deleted from history. [2] [wikipedia.org] [3] [wikipedia.org] In practice, there's a ton of vandalism, and libelous versions don't necessarily get deleted unless/until they're pointed out as being a problem ...and as you pointed out, it's not like this particular bit of information isn't recorded on Slashdot for posterity's sake.

Double-edges sword, there

[pla (258480)]

Are there any Slashdotters out there who know the facts about Gracenote -- its history, its business practices, its lawsuits? Wikipedia needs your help.

Who needs facts? If Scherf wants to change history, let's damn well change it!

I think the new entry should start, "Gracenote founder Steve Scherf has come a long way from his younder days of meth-fueled llama sodomizing. While once it looked like he'd soon die in a gutter, that six months he spent in the federal pen for killing a bussload of nuns while drunk (which he coyly refers to as "Happy happy shower butt fun time") cleaned him up, allowing him to become the ruthless corporate asshat we know today."

Revisionist history works both ways, Steve. Don't fuck with the geek masses - We can "fix" your entries MUCH faster than you can.

Re:Nope. Not going to work on Wikipedia

[pla (258480)]

Lets give him a legit reason for him to sue us. Yay.

Parody remains one of our few frequently-upheld forms of free speech. The more over-the-top, the less grounds he has to sue.

As for the side effect of damaging a valuable source of information, well, I will admit I have that as my sole reason for not editing quite a few entries on folks like Scherf, McBride, or Thompson. I respect the truth, if not the men.

But when someone like Scherf throws down the gauntlet and takes away the factual content aspect, well, not much point remains in exercising restraint, at least until someone really does fix the entry. So as a placeholder, why not let such asses suffer an entry on llama-buggery for a few weeks?

Re:Nope. Not going to work on Wikipedia

[Stormwatch (703920)]

Jeff Minter, is that you?!

This is Wikipedia's great failing

[by Anonymous Coward]

and ultimaty possible undoing. The problem is that a small group of people with prodigious amounts of time can delete and browbeat editors, in a usually succesful attempt at pushing their and only their point of view on wikipedia. Rather than strive for accuracy and truthfulness, they have no fear of continual edit wars until they brow beat other editors into compliance. As more learn how to "game" Wikipedia, any sort of seemingly controversial subject or topic will be deleted off the pages, as most editors do not have 24/7 time to patrol the pages that apparently some groups have. This prodigious amount of time lets them fly by the 3RR rule with ease. I suspect corporations and politicians have hired such groups to do just that.

I welcome a healthy debate over any topic. But the rules concerning censorship needs to be enforced much more strongly with IP bans being put in place for those that engage in censorship rather than "editing." I just don't see that happenning with the Jimbo Wale's mutual admiration society and structure that Wikipedia seems to promote.

Another article that this happens a lot with is the "Muhammad" article. No muslim will let *any* historical artwork depicting Muhummad on that page as its against their religion. Forget about truthful statements that might cast the prophet in a bad light or go against their religion (like that he founded Islam and married a young girl or his military murders). People need to chime in that this is censorship and nothing more there too.

Posting anon so I'm not trolled on Wikipedia.

Re:This is Wikipedia's great failing

[bug1 (96678)]

Its no different than "gaming" mainstream media... people will always try and cheat the system, but the strength of wikipedia is that the gamers actions are out in the open, you can see their edits.

How much POV do you think goes on in the white house briefings, or FOX news... you think wikipedia is a problem ?

Apple CD Drive tracked CD song names in 1987 !

[by Anonymous Coward]

Its true, almost 10 years before CDDB and Gracenote's corrupt seizure of the formerly PD database and GPL software, apple did it first, though to a local file database on a hard drive and not over a longer distance to a file on another machine further away.

10 years!

Technically Apple wrote the cool stuff for its cd player app in 1987 but only shipped the hardware and player application in March 1988.

After March 1988 apples developer support added a technote available for purchase that let programmers know how to create the hash for a audio cd.

it was basically the 75th of a second frame duration of each audio track and the entire disc, from what I recall, not much different than CDDB and Gracenote 10 years later.

March 1988 for Apple. I used it back then, in fact I even bought the little technote, and hand typed all my cd song names and then copied the database OVER A NETWORK to all my mac and my buddies macs so that when i played cds on any mac in the computer lab the track names would all show up.

A lot of people forget how many years ahead of technology Apple was in 1988.

Gracenote seems to be.

When CDDB closed up shop and was seized by gracenote for corrupt 16 million dollar grab I think it had only 77,000 CDs? I have TAHT database (before when it was open), I also have the last free copy of FREEDB from a couple months back.

And... I still have a working 1988 appleCD scsi drive (for testing purposes).

Apples CD SOFTWARE device independent driver was so technologically wonderful eventually it had features no other driver had :

VOLUME CONTROL of separate channels, high speed audio seeking with feedback in fast scan, reverse or forward, MONO setting form either track, preposition silent pause and hold for sudden release for games like battlechess (no seek delay when audio started). In fact apple had 9 different play position modes, eventually apple was first to offer digital audio extraction in its drives and driver standard, and CD+G and CD+G players were written (part of FWB cd-rom toolkit). Apples driver even supported many block size settings such as reading R-W tracks only, or reading CD-XA using correct trim block sizes of 2352 bytes for VCD. VCD video players were written for macs and in the pc world the VCD playback was a bizarre hack using jumbo block sizes far alrger than needed for each CDXA block.

all those technologies would suffer and rot in some way (fast audio scanning, independent left-right volume, CD+G) over the years as people only cared about cheaper simpler non-sony mechanisms. Apple eventually tried cd drives from almost every vendor.

As a side note Gracenote is trying to buy patents to try and force Neilson and force MusicBrainz (libmusicbrainz ) off the net soon via onerous litigation by the way. (smaller fish first to fry) this has to do with audio fingerprinting emerging tech (EMI, Neilson), but no patents exist that are legit because tons of stuff far before MusicBrainz exists. In fact stuff even existed years BEFORE 2001 landmark paper : M. K. Mihcak and R. Venkatesan, "A Perceptual Audio Hashing Algorithm: A Tool for Robust Audio Identification and Information Hiding," LNCS, vol. 2137, 2001, pp. 51-65. Before Gracenotes new market for myspace.com and youtube.com mp3 auto-banning, and before shazam-EMI, and before even Neilson radio scanning song ID and comemrcial spot ID services.

Gracenote is corrupt through and through. Suing Roxio for usng FreeDB was very offensive. Frivolous patents suck.

I hope someone who cares mods this above 0.

Is slashdot a new form of WP dispute resolution

[pfafrich (647460)]

Most curious, knowing nothing about this a had a peek at the wikipedia page, and the user contributions and found that mediation case [wikipedia.org], which was closed yesterday. To me this looks like your run of the mill wikipedia dispute, which have spiraled out of control, as they often do. And who is the anon poster, the same person who was blocked as an imposter [wikipedia.org] and is taking his beef elsewhere.

I don't know whats what, but its probably best to keep this stuff in the wiki. By all means people can contribute to the page but make sure you understand the various ways of wikipedia before turning this into something bigger than it is.

Apparently...

[EvilMonkeySlayer (826044)]

Somebody kept editing it saying the population of Gracenote has tripled in the last six months.

Enough of this nonsense.

[boojumbadger (949542)]

Every time I have seen one of these topic and I go look at the page it have been vandalized by someone seeing it here. This time I look at the page and someone had stapled the slashdot entry to the bottom of the gracenote page. It is the same thing with Fark, posting about wikipedia controversies on popular forums like this just makes the problem worse.

Meh

[belg4mit (152620)]

The whole thing would be moot if anybody bothered to implement CD-Text

Re:Interesting guilt plea

[by Anonymous Coward]

Because many people think that everything on Wikipedia is The Truth (tm)?

Re:Interesting guilt plea

[Brandybuck (704397)]

Wikipedia(tm) is edited by Anonymous(tm) Contributors(tm) from the Free(tm) Community(tm). How can it possibly be anything but The Truth(tm).

For you to be questioning this must mean you haven't been drinking your Kool-Aid(tm).

Re:Interesting guilt plea

[rednip (186217)]

Wikipedia should really have a disclaimer at the top of every page warning and reminding users that there's a good chance that the page below may contain absolutely no facts whatsoever. That really would solve a lot of issues, and is honest.

It's a good idea, but why limit it to Wikipedia, it should just be built into the browser itself. For that matter the TV could print a such a warning when one changes the channel to Fox News. Seriously, part of being a 'responsible consumer of knowledge' from any source is knowing that the facts may be different than presented.

Re:As someone who contributed MUCH data to cddb ..

[swordgeek (112599)]

I haven't gotten over Gracenote's theft yet. I typed in about 100 albums worth of data (out of my 400 album collection) and submitted it to the FREE CDDB. Gracenote stole my work and resold it.

But what's there to say here, really? Steve is a lying, two-faced asshole who probably actually feels wronged by all of the bad press he's earned. He belongs in the same category as Jeff Immelt and Sanford Wallace. In the same jail cell as well, actually.

Umm, he's amoral, lying and unethical?

[OmniGeek (72743)]

I worked at a company acquired by GE; we were ALL required to take a mandatory all-day *ethics training course*. Mine was held the Friday before the story about Jack Welch's unbelievably lavish and hitherto entirely secret "retirement package" (personal use of a corporate 747, his own apartment in Trump Towers including catered food and flowers, and much else, all of it lifelong and irrevocable except with Mr. Welch's consent) hit the press. You might say I felt somewhat betrayed by this...

Immelt, the CEO of GE, tried to portray this as all being perfectly fine and appropriate, and not at all excessive. Once the public outrage got too hot, the board hurriedly rescinded this platinum handshake and claimed "All fixed now, no ethical issues at all. Nothing to see here, folks, move along."

Let's see, I get punished if I don't fly the very cheapest route on company travel, regardless of the cost to my personal life, and a retired exec gets FREE use of a WHOLE 747 for his PERSONAL use whenever he feels like it? And THAT is considered ethical conduct?

That's MY beef with Mr. Immelt. Any questions?

Re:nobody cares much any more

[interiot (50685)]

Wikipedia has funding not directly related to Wikipedia, and in a way that can exert no possible editorial control or ownership over Wikipedia, eg. from wikia [wikimedia.org] and answers.com [answers.com]. Having a decent amount of revenue on the side ensures that Wikipedia won't be at risk of needing on-site advertisements or otherwise having to cede any hint of editorial control to corporate interests.

Re:My 0 cents

[by Anonymous Coward]

Here's the best way to Fight Shitnote.

In Windows at least. "replace '-' with a space"

Add the following settings to the hosts file Located at \WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

212.91.252.38-----------cddb.cddb.com
212.91.252.38-----------cddb.cddb.org
212.91.252.38-----------cddb.cddb.net
212.91.252.38-----------us.cddb.com
212.91.252.38-----------sc.ca.us.cddb.com
212.91.252.38-----------sc2.ca.us.cddb.com
212.91.252.38-----------sj.ca.us.cddb.com
212.91.252.38-----------sj2.ca.us.cddb.com

You can also download an appropriate hosts file and put it in your Windows-directory, if you don't want to add the entries by hand. You can test if this works by directing your browser e.g. to cddb.cddb.com. You should see the freedb-website instead. Instead of using 212.91.252.38 as IP-address (which is the address of us.freedb.org), you can of course use the IP-address of any of our mirrors.