Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 08:02, 2 December 2006

Simonoldyk, can you (and anyone else who wants to) please examine the documents at the Gracenote legal page. These are court documents related to the musicmatch case, and they show that the statement linked to at the Manatt website is incorrect and misleading. The link to the Manatt website points to the CV of one of the lawyers for musicmatch (Becker), and in that CV he claims that musicmatch and Gracenote settled the case after musicmatch obtained a summary judgement. This statement is shown to be false by the legal documents above. In the "order to vacate", the court reversed the summary judgement, and in the "Ruling Re Inequitable Conduct" the court found that Gracenote did not obtain its patents fraudulently. It has been argued here that simply because Becker is a lawyer it must be true. Clearly, the documents show that what Becker's CV says is not true, and is at best misleading and at worst just plain dissembling. That link should be removed from the article.

Also note that the court ruled that musicmatch was found to be in violation of contract with Gracenote (I don't recall exactly where this is mentioned in the documents - if you can't find it, I can have someone check). So, musicmatch lost the inequitable conduct trial, their summary judgements were overturned, and they were found to be in violation of at least part of their contract with Gracenote. The lawsuit section of the Gracenote article is obviously just completely wrong, and should either be very carefully crafted by someone who understands legal documents and procedures, or it should be stricken completely. I question the need for such detail, especially in light of the fact that no competitors have similar sections. And, as someone noted here, even the Microsoft article has nothing like this at all. The fact that most of the Gracenote article consists of legal junk, not to mention other negative stuff, seems quite unbalanced. Take a look at the All Music Guide page. There is no mention of legal issues, though they have lost multiple lawsuits against people from whom they (allegedly, I suppose) stole data from. They have a far older and lengthier legal history than Gracenote, but you don't see squat about it.

In addition, the lawsuit section claims:

Until the Musicmatch case, Gracenote attempted to aggressively use its patents in an attempt to enforce a monopoly in commercial CD indentification services. The inability of Gracenote to enforce its patent in the Musicmatch case opened the market for competition, and a growing global group of companies continue to enter media identification and metadata marketplace.

This is supposition, and is not supported by any links that I can see here. It's just plain untrue, in any case. There were plenty of competitors at that time in 2004: freedb was founded in 1999, musicbrainz shortly thereafter, All Music Guide (which is a very old company compared to Gracenote) also offered a competing product, YADB which was started in 2002 by JRiver, and so on. The fact is, there was lots of competition before the 2004 court decision, a fact we knew very well. This statement in the article erroneously implies that this court case somehow proved the invalidity of Gracenote's patents and opened up the entire field for competition, which is obviously untrue. Even if it were true that the case somehow knocked down the patents in question, Gracenote has no less than eight patents regarding the technology (see the USPTO website for a listing); only some of those patents were even in play during the trial, so even if some had been found invalid there are more that would have remained roadblocks to anyone trying to replicate Gracenote's business. Steve Scherf 00:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Mr. Scherf, regarding your statement that the Mannatt lawyer for Musicmatch, Mr. Becker's CV is somehow misleading, I found this reference in the State Bar of California website. In their "Rule of Professional Conduct". Rule 1-400 refers to "Advertising and Solicitation". According to section (D), Mr. Becker is clearly prohibited from making an "untrue statement" from presenting information "in a manner or format which is false, deceptive, or which tends to confuse, deceive, or mislead the public", and from omitting "any fact necessary to make the statements made, in the light of circumstances under which they are made, not misleading to the public". Are you accusing Mr. Becker of breaking these rules? In this public forum? It should be noted that in the many cases listed on Mr. Becker's CV, there seems to be varying degrees of information for each case. It would appear that he won some cases, just participated in some, and he seems to vary the information depending on the case based on his success. Gracenote's own lawyer's CV page is almost identical, in that Mr. Coates' page "talks up" the cases in which he was successful, but the Gracenote case does not mention any such success. One would assume that Musicmatch did well, and Gracenote did less well.

The collection of legal documents that are posted at the Gracenote website is incomplete. The posted documents do not include Musicmatch's claims against Gracenote, nor many of the other documents relevant to a complete understanding of the case. The Order to Vacate document does not prove anything that you say it proves. All the order says is that the judge has decided to vacate, or set aside her earlier order at Gracenote's request. The decision to vacate could have been made for a large variety of reasons according to Rule 60 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. For example, the judge may have decided that since Gracenote decided to settle for a relatively minor contract violation issue, the previous decision or decisions could be set aside since they are no longer relevant. Finally, whether or not Gracenote got its patents in proper manner or not is irrelevant to the fact that Musicmatch was found not to violate those patents, and to this day still operates its own media recognition service for Musicmatch Jukebox.

Your reference to other companies' is irrelevant to this discussion. However looking at the article I do note several references to legal and other issues. Regarding I did do a search on several search engines for legal problems for its owner, , but cannot find any reference to lawsuits you allege to have occurred. However, a quick seach of "Gracenote lawsuit" on returns many links which refer to Gracenote's lawsuits against its own clients, Roxio and Musicmatch. This propensity to sue customers is most likely one of the reasons why Gracenote has gained notoriety as a controversial company.

With regards to your comments below about the aggressive use of patents and competition opening up after the Musicmatch decision, I cannot find reference to prove this, other than the "Rants and Raves" reader comments at the end of your own interview at Wired. It appears that at least one of your competitors felt that Gracenote was quite aggressive in trying to prevent him from having a good business.

This is getting too long winded and I do apologize. Simonkoldyk, please note that much of what Mr. Scherf is stating is not the complete truth, and in some cases just not the truth. I will refrain from editing the article, but this exercise does show that an employee of a company, regardless of good intent, should not be participating in editing an article. And thank you again for being reasonable.Fatandhappy 17:23, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Also, the statement that Gracenote "...attempted to aggressively use its patents in an attempt to enforce a monopoly..." is not an impartial statement. Patents are, by definition, a legal monopoly in a specific area, and stating it like this is intended to vilify Gracenote. Further, if one actually were to read Gracenote's patents, you would see that in no way would they bar anyone from entering the CD identification business. CD identification was around way before Gracenote ever existed (see the full text of the recent Wired interview for details on the history of CD identification), and could therefore not be patented. Gracenote's patents only cover additional methods that either aid in identification or are used after a CD has been identified. Nothing about the Gracenote patents would ever stop someone from starting their own CD recognition service, unless they tried to implement these patented additional methods themselves.

In any case the quoted statement is repetetive (lots of attempted attempts), and identification is misspelled. Steve Scherf 00:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

First of all, please do not split my comments in half by inserting your own comments inside. It's very confusing and makes the posting record difficult to determine. Second, I would appreciate it if you would stop accusing me of lying at every turn. It's getting very old, and threatens to break up the civility that almost seemed to have appeared. I will refrain from escalating, but will say that you need to cut the rhetoric. I'll say again what I've said a number of times before - just as you claim I shouldn't be editing this article, neither should you. People with extreme bias should recuse themselves from editing topics, and that includes people on both sides. But as long as you're going to be here doing your best to hurt Gracenote in any way you can, then I see no reason why I shouldn't be here too.

Now, as for the verity of the the fact that the court overturned itself on the summary judgement, what do you think the vacation order refers to? And yes, Becker's text is deceptive. It says that Gracenote and MM settled after the summary judgement, which is technically entirely true. He just happens to omit the fact that the summary judgement was overturned, which sure makes his summarization of the case look good. I will not disparage Becker here. I admit that it could be a simple error and totally unintentional. But it is deceptive in a material way, because it omits a very important fact. The link to that page should be removed from the Gracenote article.

As for your statement that the documents are missing relevant information WRT the court vacating its prior summary judgements against Gracenote, you must not be reading the documents closely. Please refer to the order to vacate, page 2. There you will see it say, The following prior orders are hereby VACATED, followed by a list of two orders, dockets 683 and 779. It also provides the names of the two documents, to avoid confusion. Now please refer to document 683, aka "Order Addressing Parties' Cross Motions For Summary Judgement Re: Patent Infringement". If you don't see it, it says "document 683" at the top of each page, so there is no question this is the document being referred to. This is the summary judgement in which the court rules on patent infringement. Look at page 24, the conclusion section. You can read the entire document if you like, but the relevant points are here. The document says that it grants Musicmatch a summary judgement of non-infringement of patents '192 and `593. The order also asserts that in some areas the patents are invalid, and so on. Altogether a pretty nasty looking judgement for Gracenote, for sure. People who have a chip on their shoulder sure latched on to this one, and one can see why. So here is where summary judgement against two of Gracenote's patents was issued, and the "Order to Vacate" document is where the court reversed itself by stating that document 683 is vacated. I don't know how to lay it out any more plainly than that. So the statements, "...Musicmatch received summary judgement on all of Gracenote's patent claims.", "A summary judgement found that Musicmatch's CDDB replacement service does not violate Gracenote's patents." and "The inability of Gracenote to enforce its patent in the Musicmatch case opened the market for competition..." in the Gracenote article are deceptive and untrue. Further, since the text on Becker's page has also been shown to be misleading, the text linking to it should also be removed.

There can be no further disagreement on these points. The court documents prove everything that I've said here. I do not want to hear further claims that I am lying, that the documents are fake, or that crucial information is missing. These court documents show that the summary judgement against Gracenote, WRT patent infringement among other things, was reversed by the court. End of story.

It is imperative that this entire section be deleted, or be correct. Frankly, this is the section I care about the most, because of the glaring errors our GC has pointed out to me. It causes undue harm to Gracenote, and we are legally obligated to ensure it is factually perfect. Until it is, this discussion will not end. Believe me when I say I've got better things to do and really, really want to get back to actual work. I think the section should be deleted or limited to a few (neutral tone) sentences. The text tries to impart the message that Gracenote's patents were knocked down and that they suffered a substantial loss in the case. Since I have shown this to not be the case, the main thrust of this section is invalid and it no longer justifies dominating so much of the article.

FYI, Gracenote settled because the court limited the scope of the subsequent trial (the purpose of which was to determine the extent of musicmatch's contractual culpability - they had already been found in breach of contract on some counts) that had just begun, which affected total damages that Gracenote could collect from Musicmatch, and because it was revealed that Yahoo (one of our customers) was trying to acquire musicmatch. To collect the kind of damages we wanted, we would have had to appeal to the next court and start over again. After years of litigation, that was not a happy option. Plus, we'd be suing our own customer, Yahoo, which we didn't want to do because they were a good customer. We did not settle because our patents were hurt in any way.

Simonkoldyk, please let me know if any of this is unclear in any way, and I would be glad to help clarify. I look forward to seeing this section of the article fixed.

Simonkoldyk, thank you for organizing these issues. Also, please note that Mr. Scherf is unable to refute that that Musicmatch's lawyer, Mr. Becker, is legally bound to not mislead in his CV. Also, please note that the Order to Vacate could easily be a part of the settlement that Gracenote and Musicmatch worked out after it was determined that Gracenote would only be able to continue the case on relatively minor contract violation issues. This was pointed out in my earlier response, as well. The fact that Musicmatch was found not to violate any Gracenote patents in a federal court, and that Gracenote immediately settled for what seems to be a minor issue immediately afterwards is a strong legal precedent in itself, according to my lawyer friends familiar with the case. Further, trying to attribute the settlement to Yahoo's desire to purchase Musicmatch is misleading. Yahoo had been trying to purchase Musicmatch some time before the decision to settle, and was holding out to see the results of the patent portion of the litigation, as is documente in the current Gracenote article. This section should not be deleted since it is one of the most important reasons for the notoriety of the company.

Mr. Scherf, sorry for responding in the middle of your response. Your response was lengthy and fragmented, so it was difficult to respond in an easy to understand fashion. I'll avoid this in the future. In the future could you try to be a bit more concise, and add less rhetoric? Fatandhappy 01:32, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

This is pretty appalling. The conclusions drawn here are totally amazing leaps of logic. I thought I refuted Becker's CV pretty clearly, whether or not he is legally bound to tell the truth on his CV. I'm no lawyer, so I do not know exactly what lawyers are allowed to say and what they are not allowed to say. But I do know that they have certain ethical obligations, and not lying on your CV seems like it should be one of those obligations. His CV is misleading, you cannot dispute that given the court documents (your claims that the order to vacate is somehow weak is irrelevant, because the fact remains that the summary judgement was overturned yet his CV does not acknowledge that). I will not say, however, that Mr. Becker's CV is knowingly false, because I do not know if he personally wrote it, or if whoever did write it was simply misinformed. And I don't care. All that matters is that it's misleading, whatever the reason. Are you trying to say that because lawyers aren't allowed to mislead on their CV that there's no way his CV could be misleading? That would be a very naive thing to believe. It sounds like you are still trying to imply that the documents are somehow false, simply because lawyers are not allowed to lie and the website CV of some lawyer conflicts with the documents? Should we believe the website of a biased party, or a document straight from the court (who also cannot lie)? If you are trying to say that the documents are false, please feel free to call Gracenote and ask our general counsel himself. As a lawyer, he has the same ethical responsibilities as any other lawyer. He has offered to speak with you and tell you straight out that the documents are valid. Or why not call Becker himself and ask him if the documents are valid? While you're at it, you might want to let him know his CV needs a little attention. Either way, if you think the documents are fabricated, please just say so plainly.

And all this nonsense that "the order to vacate could easily be part of the settlement..." is total supposition. I don't know how courts work, so I don't even know if it's legally possible to get a judge to reverse herself (esp. in a potentially embarrassing way), just to make a plaintiff happy. Please provide a link documenting that your claim here is actually the case. Unverified claims such as yours are not justification for keeping bogus text in an article.

As for the rest of your commentary, I'm not even going to bother. Your assumptions and guesses about this and that, and the opinions of your lawyer friends who are supposedly familiar with the case yet don't seem able to help you interpret a two page order, are out in left field and totally irrelevant without documented fact. Please provide a link that contains credible (i.e. not speculative) evidence on the reversal of the summary judgement.

Again, this is all appalling. I have provided documented proof that the text in the article is wrong. Conspiracy theories to the contrary are not proof. There's nothing else to say. Steve Scherf 02:46, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Scherf, calling it appalling is not proving anything. You have not provided any documentation that refutes my points, while I have provided to sources to prove my points. Do you argue with the fact that lawyers have strict rules of conduct - you seem to be doing so by calling the CV misleading multiple times. Do you argue the fact that judges in federal courts per the rule I posted above could possibly vacate a judgement for a whole slew of reasons? It is interesting that the Gracenote legal page does not provide any documents regarding the reasons for decision to vacate. It also is interesting that the decsion came right around the same time that the case was being settled. Do you have any documents to refute that? Fatandhappy 04:42, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I feel like I'm feeding the trolls at this point, but here goes, I guess:

• Do you argue with the fact that lawyers have strict rules of conduct - you seem to be doing so by calling the CV misleading multiple times.

I think I was pretty plain on this point. And I think it's obvious that I am calling Becker's CV misleading because proven non-credible information is not valid for use in Misplaced Pages articles.

• Do you argue the fact that judges in federal courts per the rule I posted above could possibly vacate a judgement for a whole slew of reasons?

As I have said, I am not a lawyer and have no idea what the bounds of a federal court are.

• It is interesting that the Gracenote legal page does not provide any documents regarding the reasons for decision to vacate.

Gracenote didn't even have a legal page until the craziness of this silly article necessitated posting legal documents. We only gathered enough documents directly from the court to prove that the article is wrong. There are zillions of pages of documents to choose from, so nobody wasted time on unnecessary stuff. I'm not even sure the court ever issued such a document, because the case was settled soon thereafter. I know that the court never issued a more detailed explanation of why it ruled for Gracenote in the bench trial for that same reason. However, I was in the courtroom when lawyers on both sides helped educate the judge on patent law, because she didn't know it very well. She had only ever tried one patent case before, and it just happened to be going on at the same time as ours. She and her clerks made some fundamental errors of law in the summary judgement, and she was visibly horrified when she understood what she had done. There were probably other things going on too (not of the sort you seem to be hoping to find), but if so, either I wasn't privy or have forgotten. I didn't bother discussing any of this because I'd have to have a copy of the courtroom transcript to prove it, and I don't. And I'm not going to bother to see if one can be acquired, because this is already pretty absurd. But it does not matter one whit. The court vacated the summary judgement (a fact which you thankfully seem to not be disputing), and the text of the article must reflect that fact. End of story. Steve Scherf 05:48, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Another Article Summarizing the Musicmatch Case

Not quite the end of the story. Here is yet another article that shows how Musicmatch was not infringing on Gracenote patents. This was published in March of 2005, long after the suit was settled. It even has a quote from the Gracenote lawyer. According to this article which was republished from the Los Angeles Daily Journal and the San Francisco Journal, Musicmatch prevailed on the patent infringement parts of the lawsuit, and that breach of contract and copyright issues survived. It seems clear from this article that Gracenote did not win in its case that Musicmatch infringed on its patents. Fatandhappy 06:29, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Whatever this crazy publication is, it's definitely entertaining if nothing else. Well, it's wrong too, as the court documents prove. Journalists are generally not lawyers. Not sure why a quote from our lawyer is relevant either, especially when all it says is that Becker's a smart guy. I'm sure he is, it's not easy to be a lawyer. Steve Scherf 08:02, 2 December 2006 (UTC)