LinuxPlanet - Print - The StartX Files: A Strong Lack of Grace

The StartX Files: A Strong Lack of Grace

By: Brian Proffitt
Tuesday, March 20, 2001 08:51:48 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/3127/1/

A soothing new name to go with your hijacking?

I missed my CD burner.

It came as part of the standard hardware package when I first bought my Linux box a couple of years ago. One nice little IDE CD-RW tucked nicely under a CD-ROM drive. And, for the two days I left the Windows OS on that machine before I could wipe it in favor of Red Hat Linux, I was blissfully content to burn lots of data and audio CDs.

Then Linux arrived, and I could not use my CD burner any more. Try as I might, I could not get SCSI emulation working for my IDE drive.

And then it came to pass that Linux-Mandrake's and SuSE's developers finally figured out a way for everybody to be happy. Suddenly, I could have my CD burner and use it too.

But which CD application to use? After all, there is the mkisofs and mkhybrid command line utilities to create the image and the cdrecord, cdrdao, mkvcdfs apps to actually burn the CD, but command line interfaces are pretty frightening for the uninitiated, and frankly, I have never seen a GUI that really simplifies the CD recording process.

There are several good GUIs out there for burning CDs, not the least of which is X-CD-Roast. I was rummaging around the site for this fine application, thinking I would do a nice little roundup of all the CD burners. I will probably do this in the near future, but for now, I wanted to touch on some sinister goings-on in the world of music databases.

Many music-oriented programs, such as CD players and CD burners, access a central database to acquire music artist and track information. Until July of last year, this was typically the CDDB database. The CDDB database was a model of openness: users would voluntarily submit data about their CDs and then could access the entirety of the database for their own needs. Developers benefited from this greatly because their own customers were maintaining what would become a huge database. Everyone seemed to benefit from this arrangement.

Suddenly, things began to change. In a fit of raging profiteering, CDDB, now going by the soft and soothing name Gracenote, changed the terms of its licenses for developers. No longer could developers give their applications free access to the database if those applications would generate any kind of revenue, including shareware, support, advertising, or even links. Now you had to pay what Gracenote terms a "modest" fee. Oh, it's modest, all right, but you now have to jump through some serious hoops to access the CDDB database.

To gain access to the CDDB database, your application now has to use the Gracenote CDDB Client, display the logo for this client, and provide end-users with the means to separately register with Gracenote's service. Oh, and just to be sure this all happens the way Gracenote wants, your application has to go through a mandatory validation process--otherwise you're stuck with the mere 100-user license Gracenote assigns when a developer asks for it.

For all of this rigmarole, you get to pay a one-time fee of $495 for the first 5,000 users, and then $.06/year for each additional user over the first 5,000. If you want to just prepay and buy the end-user licenses ahead of time, that schedule works out to:

5,000 extra licenses: $575/yr
50,000 extra licenses: $2,800/yr
100,000 extra licenses: $5,500/yr
250,000 extra licenses: $13,500/yr

Oh, and did I mention the $250/hour telephone support fees?

Not bad for what used to be a publicly contributed database.

Thou shalt have no other CD databases before (or with) us.

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.

What Gracenote has done is hijacked public information, plain and simple. Ironically, it got that information from users who were essentially hijacking it from the CD labels and typing it into their computers. Now Gracenote has taken this information, claimed it as proprietary, and is only doling out the data to those who will pledge obedience to the keepers of the data.

In an even better twist, they are now partnering with record labels to deliver exclusive content to those who actually own the CD or an artist's music--as opposed to pulling it down from GNapster. Regardless of what you think about the legality of downloaded music, it strikes me as odd that a group of people who essentially are using information copied right off a CD's booklet can now pass themselves off as the "Official" keepers of all things music.

How bad does this get?

Try this little piece of news: to comply with the Federal Court's decision, Napster must now identify copyrighted music from its servers and get rid of it. This is no easy task, since Napster's primary means of identification is the filename. And we all owkna atwha appensha ota eretha. But guess who Napster's called in to help? None other than our good friends Gracenote, who will now use their (how was that acquired, again?) vast storehouse of knowledge to ID copyrighted music on Napster's servers.

Gracenote, regardless of what their spin-meisters may claim, has done a great injustice to developers and end-users alike. They are the very embodiment what's wrong with closed-source software and data. It is up to us to bolster truly open music data sites like FreeDB and CDIndex so we can keep our data for ourselves, not let someone run off and make money with our direct efforts.

Of course, this mission is already underway. If you look at Gracenote's list of approved applications by platform, only two free applications show up on the Linux/UNIX list: AcornCD and xmcd/cda. Everyone else seems to have shied away and started using public databases that will stay public.