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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Scherf (talk | contribs) at 00:52, 5 December 2006 (→Mediation Cabal). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

On 2006-12-02, Gracenote was linked from Slashdot, a high-traffic website. (Traffic) All prior and subsequent edits to the article are noted in its revision history.

The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute. When updating the article, be bold, but not reckless. Feel free to try to improve the article, but don't take it personally if your changes are reversed; instead, come here to the talk page to discuss them. Content must be written from a neutral point of view. Include citations when adding content and consider tagging or removing unsourced information.

Archives

/Archive1, /Archive2, /Archive3

Controversy

I have removed the part about losing Microsoft as a customer as I could not find anything in Google searches or Google news. Please do not place it back until you have a verifiable source. While I do not know exactly why their is an edit war going on, I'm going to step in and try and help clean things up. I'm here at the request of nobody and do not favor any side. Although, adding information without sources or proof will not help you. --Simonkoldyk 22:09, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

External Links

I have removed external links to any competitor, they are fine for talking about them in the article; but, it should be kept to a minimum. See Coca-Cola and Pepsi for an example both talk about each other in article which is fine; but, no mention in external links. --Simonkoldyk 22:25, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

GPL

See discussion

I see this issue as now resolved. --Simonkoldyk 22:36, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Gracenote vs Musicmatch

See discussion

Mr. Becker's CV, Court Documents, Other Legal Issues

See discussion

I have addressed everything in your post, if you have problems with how I addressed it start another little thing and refer to this subpage as needed. --Simonkoldyk 18:48, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Competition

This sentence:

• Several large commercial licensees dropped Gracenote's service, such as Musicmatch Jukebox, and have moved to the commercial service provided by All Media Guide.

has several issues. I have seen no proof that several large commercial licensees have dropped Gracenote and moved to AMG's service. Please provide documentation. (I'm not being disingenuous here. I don't actually remember for sure, but I do doubt that any big players went to AMG at all.) Musicmatch did leave, but they did not go to AMG. They started their own service, called CDi. See the musicmatch privacy page here and scroll down to section 2. See the explanation of CDi and how it ties in with their application. It is essentially a service and protocol of their own devising. But it should be noteworthy that Yahoo has been working on migrating musicmatch users to their own player, which uses Gracenote. Steve Scherf 00:58, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Please see and search for AMG. --Simonkoldyk 01:35, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

The musicmatch player uses the CDi service, a service of their own devising, as I noted. They have licensed data only from AMG, and that is not the only source of their data. They have their own data as well. So the CD lookup service they use is their own, and much of the data is their own. Only part of the data came from AMG, and no service from AMG. The page I linked to says this, The Musicmatch Jukebox contains Musicmatch CD lookup (CDI) service for compact disc identification. I think it's pretty clear that they are using CDi, their own service, not Lasso, AMG's service. The link you provide only discusses AMG data, nothing else about AMG. So the text that says they moved over to AMG's service is incorrect. I provide these links to prove my point, but believe me when I say I know this, because they are a customer and it also all came out in the lawsuit anyway... Even if for some reason you do not believe this, then please cite a source that specifically states they are using the AMG Lasso service. Steve Scherf 01:54, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Simonkoldyk, although Scherf earlier claims that Microsoft never dropped Gracenote/CDDB, here is a link to an Escient press release regarding the purchase of CDDB referring to Microsoft's Deluxe CD Player formerly using CDDB. So it seems that Microsoft did drop Gracenote after the commercialization, after all. Regarding Musicmatch, there is no evidence that the Musicmatch player, a different player than the Yahoo! Player, is using Gracenote. The CDi service appears to be alive and well and functioning without problem. Fatandhappy 02:09, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

For crying out loud, the Microsoft Deluxe CD Player used two services, none of them CDDB: Tunes.com and Musicboulevard.com. Tunes.com was a licensee of CDDB at the time of the Escient press release and had their own service with (some) CDDB data inside it, that's all. Get yourself a copy of WIndows 98 and try it out for yourself, and you'll see the tunes.com logo when it does a lookup. Or read one of the zillions of web links on the topic. Keep scratching at those straws...

WRT to your comment about musicmatch using CDi, when did I ever dispute that? I agree with you, musicmatch uses CDi. The point is that they do not use AMG Lasso. Steve Scherf 02:56, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

FYI, here's a link to the press release for the Microsoft player and Tunes.com: . Steve Scherf 03:04, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for agreeing that Microsoft did use CDDB with its CD Deluxe product. It appears from the Tunes.com release that you linked to describes the additional content (Rolling Stones info, commerce links, etc.) and that the recognition is coming from CDDB, though it does not mention. For crying out loud, Scherf, in the Escient press release it clearly states, The CDDB database currently provides music CD identification information to more than 25 officially-supported players, including the new Microsoft(R) Deluxe CD Player (MSFT), as well as the Notify CD Player, Quintessential CD Player, Discplay 4, and Xmcd. Do you dispute the factuality your own company's press release (since CDDB was a division of Escient at the time)? And do you debate that Microsoft dropped support for CDDB by building its own service shortly after the commercilization of CDDB?

WRT, the current article does not state that Musicmatch uses AMG Lasso; it states that it moved to the commercial service provided by All Media Guide. According to the All Media Guide article, the company provides services to companies like Musicmatch. Can you provide a source that shows this as incorrect? Who is "scratching at straws" here? Please kindly keep the rudeness out of the discussion. Fatandhappy 04:13, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I think the Microsoft press release was pretty clear, they used Tunes.com. Tunes licensed CDDB data in addition to their own, but not the CDDB service. These facts are not in dispute. Yes, that Escient press release is overblown, and I have no doubt that the marketing person who cranked that one out loved the thought of saying MS was a customer. That doesn't change the fact that the Deluxe CD app used Tunes.com's service, not CDDB's service. In fact, the communication protocol used by Deluxe CD player and Tunes.com was of Microsoft's own device, and didn't even slightly resemble the CDDB protocol that the CDDB service used. Play semantics all you want, but the fact is that Microsoft used Tunes.com and Musicboulevard.com's service. You might refer to the Wired article if you still don't believe the MS stuff. It's stated pretty plainly that Microsoft did not want to use CDDB directly, and instead ended up using CDDB through third party vendor (i.e. Tunes.com).

As far as musicmatch is concerned, the musicmatch player uses CDI, a commercial service provided by musicmatch for musicmatch. They do not use the AMG service. So the article is wrong. Part of their database consists of AMG data, and that's it. These are all semantic games. If you want the article to contain truth, why not say that "musicmatch moved over to its own CD lookup service, CDi, that partially contained AMG data in addition to data collected by musicmatch"? Anything else is misleading. For that matter, why not say "Microsoft stopped using Tunes.com, a service that licensed CDDB data to supplement its own database"? Steve Scherf 04:27, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Edited

Please read and comment. --Simonkoldyk 04:37, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

The new text in the competition section seems okay, except "licensee" should probably be "licensees, ". Steve Scherf 05:00, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Fixed. --Simonkoldyk 05:06, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Simonkoldyk, thanks again for working on this. The new section could mention that many smaller CDDB licensees moved to freedb after the commercialization. This is supported by looking at the lists of supported appliations on the May 1999 Gracenote site and the November 2001 freedb site. Just a quick scan of these two pages shows that a applications such as Audiograbber, CD-DA Xtractor, Feurio, InCDius, and others had already made the move after Gracenote commercialized and changed its license terms.

In the part that refers to Microsoft, it should mention that shortly thereafter, Microsoft dumped CDDB altogether to build their own CD recogniton service based on All Media Guide and other databases for identifying CD's in Windows Media Player.

The section on Musicmatch has a couple of minor tweaks necessary. CDi is mispelled (the last i is supposed to be lowercase). The CDi identification service was developed based on the All Media Guide database, with additional data being submitted by the Musicmatch users, similar to what Microsoft did with Windows Media Player. The AMG service called Lasso does not seem to have been released until after Musicmatch was found to not be infringing on Gracenote's patents in 2004, more than 2 years later. Thanks again for your patience. Fatandhappy 08:10, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

The section is more accurate and fair as-is, capitalization error aside. It took a long time to arrive at what is fair common ground. The section is not perfect, but I am willing to accept it. Please try and show some good faith. Steve Scherf 09:40, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Moved Discussions

As this page is getting very long and very complicated I have started to move each topic that gets long to its own subpage so that parties interested in certain things can deal with those without having to go through the entire page, also for me to follow everything. Also I archived some past posts as you can see in the archive at the top. --Simonkoldyk 18:49, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Mediation Cabal

Hi everyone, I'm from the Mediation Cabal. I'm sorry it took so long for us to respond, but, well, none of us are being paid to do this and backlogs happen.

Do you still want a mediator? If not, just say so and we can leave it at that - if any party refuses mediation, it can't work, and you can always re-request mediation at a later date if need be. If so, then I'll do my best to assist.

If mediation is required, it would be helpful if one or more parties could provide a brief summary of exactly which parts of the article need to be edited. The impression gleaned from edit histories and talk subpages can be a bit fragmented. By "brief", I mean brief - no need to go into the justification, just what the positions are.

Although we can use the dedicated mediation page if need be, I suggest replying on this talk page for now. --Sam Blanning 00:59, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I appreciate that you are volunteering, and understand the delay. I'm actually pleasantly surprised, given that an editor here (I forget who) said that probably no mediator would volunteer to take this up. With the help of Simonkoldyk, we've actually begun to make some progress on some of the blatant errors here. But things have stalled, and there are two remaining issues that need addressing. The text in the musicmatch section does not reflect the actual events, which is the main problem here. I am not an attorney, and cannot explain in simple terms exactly what's wrong. Our counsel wrote and approved the text I previously posted here, text that was reverted consistently, despite supporting court documents. Our GC wants it fixed, because it misrepresents the facts, and I have been attempting to do this at his request. We are not looking to whitewash history, as some have claimed, but the supported facts need to be represented here.

The second issue is the overall tone of this article. The page is dominated by Gracenote detractors, who have resisted our attempts to even describe what Gracenote does in the article. I am admittedly partial to Gracenote, but how silly is that? Gracenote has made some major headlines lately, including huge press over lyrics licensing, and even huger headlines over supplying myspace.com with content filtering technology. There are hundreds of articles on that, and one cannot dispute that it deserves some mention here. But because the page is dominated by people whose goal is apparently to allow NO favorable information to make its way into the Gracenote page, it will be impossible to achieve through normal channels.

We realize that Misplaced Pages frowns on biased parties editing articles, but I would argue that these people are just as biased in the opposite direction. I had hoped that mediation would be possible, but several of them posted things to the mediation request that make it clear they won't negotiate in good faith. If you can suggest any way to arrive at a fair page that corrects the two things I have mentioned here, I would be happy to hear it. We have tried to fix the page, openly without hiding behind anonymity, though normal channels, and it hasn't worked. Any approach taken to fix the page must be durable and not require a lot of attention, or there's not much point to it. I have basically already given up and handed the problem back to Gracenote's PR/legal folks, but I'll listen to suggestions. Steve Scherf 00:52, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

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