Gracenote

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Gracenote Inc.
Type Private
Founded 1998
Headquarters Emeryville, California, USA
Products Digital music recognition technology
Employees 95 (2006)
Website www.gracenote.com

Gracenote is a private for-profit company which maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio CDs. Computer software applications such as iTunes that are capable of playing CDs use Gracenote's CDDB or a competing service. Gracenote's database was originally created from and continues to receive voluntary contributions from users of this type of software. If music is not available in the company's database, the user is asked to input information such as the artist, album, and song name. Gracenote now also receives music information from third party database companies and record labels.[citations needed]

In addition to its CD track-identification system, Gracenote operates a digital file identification service which allows digital music files (such as MP3s) to be identified, and a media management service for the generation of playlists, and recommendation of music.

Contents

History

Gracenote began in 1993 as an open source project involving a CD player program named xmcd. The xmcd player was developed by Ti Kan and had the ability to store and recognize CDs from a database. Xmcd users regularly sent additional CD information to Mr. Kan for inclusion in the database via email. By 1995, the database had become unwieldy and Steve Scherf, a friend of Mr. Kan, was recruited to build a server to store the CD information in a network database. Later, hosting facilities and an advertising business model were provided by an ex-patriate Scot living in Texas, Graham Toal.[1]

As CDs do not generally contain any digitally-encoded information about their contents (see CD Text), Kan developed software which identifies and looks up CDs based on TOC or "Table of Contents" information stored at the beginning of each disc. The TOC lists the offsets (locations on disk) corresponding to the start of each track on a CD. The matching is fuzzy and tolerates some variation in track offsets.

The CDDB technology became popular in the 1990s, as it allowed MP3s to be automatically annotated with artist, album, title, and other information during the process of ripping from CD.

Some computer users who have copied vinyl LPs from their turntables onto CD-Rs have been surprised to find their computers correctly displaying the titles and track listings when these CD-Rs are played on their computer. This happens when a commercial CD is a remastered version of an LP, containing the same tracks in the same order. If the track offsets of the homemade CD match the track timings of the commercial CD to within a second, the CDDB database can identify the CD successfully.[citations needed]

In 2005, Gracenote purchased audio recognition technology from Philips that is highly tolerant of noise and allows for the recognition of music over a cell phone microphone. It markets this service, which is used in music and video players, PC software, home consumer electronics products, mobile music applications, cell phone handsets, and automobile audio and navigation systems, as "Mobile MusicID". [2]

In 2006 Gracenote announced [3] that it had licensed lyrics from some of the major music publishing companies, to expand its services.

Licensing controversy

In 1998, the service was purchased by Escient, a consumer electronics manufacturer and operated as a business unit within the Indiana based company. CDDB was then spun out of Escient and then in July of 2000 renamed Gracenote.[4]

In 1999, freedb, an open source clone of the Gracenote CDDB service, was created by former CDDB users who wanted a non-commercial alternative. The track listing database freedb used to seed its new service was based on the data released for public use by CDDB.

The CDDB database license was changed, and some programmers complained that the new license included certain terms that they couldn't accept: if one wanted to access CDDB, one was not allowed to access any other CDDB-like database, and any programs using a CDDB lookup had to display a CDDB logo while performing the lookup.[5] The service was also no longer a free for everyone, requiring commercial developers (not end-users) to pay an "initial fee", as well as a license fee based on the usage of the servers and support. [citation needed]

In March, 2001, Gracenote banned all unlicensed applications from accessing their database. New licenses for CDDB1 (the original version of CDDB) were no longer available, so programmers using Gracenote services were required to switch to CDDB2 (a new version incompatible with CDDB1 and hence with freedb).[5]

The maneuver was controversial, and remains so to this day, because the CDDB database was and is built on the voluntary submission of CD track data by thousands of individual users. Initially, most of these were users of the xmcd CD player program. The xmcd program itself was an open-source, GPL project. Many listing contributors believed that the database was open-source as well, because in 1997, cddb.com's download and support pages had said it was released under the GPL[6] [7]. CDDB claims that license grant was an error, and had modified the website in 1998 to avoid mention of the database's copyright status.[8]

Database size controversy

As of 2005, Gracenote claims that its database contains information on almost 4 million CDs.[9] [10] The reliability both of this statement and of the database itself have been challenged. Because the information going into the database has not been subjected to quality control, duplicate entries are very common. David Jennings, in an article entitled "How many CDs are there in the world?" gives an example of a six-CD set in which "two of the six CDs appear twice in the database, and one appears three times".[11] An article on the Seattle Times website cites Ty Roberts, chief technology officer of Gracenote, as saying that there are approximately 500,000 individual CD titles commercially released and available for sale today in the United States.[12]

Competition

The commercialization of the CDDB prompted the creation of open-source initiatives freedb and MusicBrainz. Competing commercial services include All Media Guide's AMG LASSO and MusicIP.

Customers

iTunes is a popular software program using Gracenote's CD track identification service. As of late 2006 iTunes also uses the company's services to locate cover art for audio files previously ripped.[citation needed]

Yahoo's Musicmatch Jukebox no longer uses the Gracenote database and has started its own music identification service called CDi. Microsoft also used the Gracenote database at one point for its Deluxe CD Player product via one of Gracenote's licensees, Tunes.com.[13][14] Microsoft subsequently built its own media recognition and metadata service. Both Microsoft and Musicmatch built their services using databases and services from All Media Guide.

Lawsuits

Gracenote v. Roxio

In 2001, Gracenote sued Roxio and its parent Adaptec[15] for "breach of contract, patent infringement, trademark infringement and other violations of Federal law"[16] when Roxio tried to switch to freedb.[17] Roxio filed countersuit against Gracenote for fraudulently obtaining a patent, misuse of said patent, antitrust behaviour, and breach of contract.[18] The case was settled in 2002. The terms were not disclosed, but Roxio became a licensee of Gracenote.[19]

Gracenote v. Musicmatch

In 2002, Gracenote filed suit against MusicMatch, another former licensee, for breach of contract and patent violations [20]. MusicMatch filed a counter-suit against Gracenote.[21] On August 26, 2004, the Court issued its ruling on the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment regarding their patent infringement claims [22]. In its ruling, the court ruled that MusicMatch had not infringed Gracenote's patents, and invalidated one of Gracenote's patents. The court left open the question of the validity of the other patent, and the question of whether or not Gracenote had have engaged in inequitable conduct in obtaining its patents (allegedly fraudulent withholding of information about prior art from the Patent and Trademark Office). As described below, the Court later vacated this order. On August 27, 2004, the Court issued its ruling on the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment regarding their breach of contract and related claims [23]. In its ruling, the Court found that MusicMatch did breach its contract with Gracenote.

Subsequently, following a four day bench trial on the issue of inequitable conduct, the Court ruled in Gracenote’s favor that there had been no inequitable conduct on the part of Gracenote in obtaining any of the patents-in-suit [24].

The case was to have continued to a jury trial, but was settled when Yahoo, one of Gracenote’s customers, announced its pending purchase of MusicMatch[25]. The Court also vacated the summary judgment order it had issued on August 26, 2004[26].

Some observers[27] speculated that Yahoo! had been holding off on finalizing its purchase of Musicmatch until the Gracenote patent claims were resolved.

See also

References

  1. ^ http://www.ibiblio.org/tkan/xmcd/cddb_wsj_12.31.01.pdf
  2. ^ http://www.research.philips.com/newscenter/archive/2005/050830-audiofp.html
  3. ^ http://gracenote.com/corporate/press/article.html/date=2006071700
  4. ^ cddb.com (July 24, 2000). CDDB Re-launches as Gracenote With New Products. Press release. (currently offline, accessed via archive.org)
  5. ^ a b Why freedb.org?. freedb. Retrieved on 2006-05-09.
  6. ^ CDDB Downloads. cddb.com. (currently offline, accessed via archive.org)
  7. ^ CDDB News, Information and Support. cddb.com. (currently offline, accessed via archive.org)
  8. ^ Technical information and FAQ for the CDDB project. cddb.com.
  9. ^ Gracenote Products: CDDB. gracenote.com. (currently offline, accessed via archive.org)
  10. ^ Gracenote News. gracenote.com. (currently offline, accessed via archive.org)
  11. ^ http://alchemi.co.uk/archives/mus/how_many_cds_ar.html
  12. ^ "Online music services need to meet demand", The Seattle Times, 2005. Retrieved on 2006-11-29.
  13. ^ http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1998_August_11/ai_21005542
  14. ^ http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1998/jun98/tunejtpr.mspx
  15. ^ http://www.gracenote.com/corporate/legal/gracenote_v_adaptec_roxio.pdf
  16. ^ cddb.com (May 10, 2001). Gracenote Files Lawsuit Against Roxio, Inc.. Press release. (currently offline, accessed via archive.org)
  17. ^ "Gracenote under pressure", CNET News.com, 2001. Retrieved on 2006-11-29.
  18. ^ Roxio Answers and Countersues in Gracenote Lawsuit. Press release. Retrieved on 2006-12-02.
  19. ^ http://investor.napster.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=68888
  20. ^ http://www.gracenote.com/corporate/legal/gracenote_v_musicmatch.pdf
  21. ^ A summarized overview of the case is available at the Manatt website within Mr. Robert D. Becker's list of representative cases. Mr. Becker was one of Musicmatch's lawyers during the case. http://www.manatt.com/Attorneys.aspx?id=1437&full=451
  22. ^ http://www.gracenote.com/corporate/legal/gracenote_v_musicmatch_08_26_2004_order.pdf
  23. ^ http://www.gracenote.com/corporate/legal/gracenote_v_musicmatch_08_27_2004_order.pdf
  24. ^ http://www.gracenote.com/corporate/legal/gracenote_v_musicmatch_ruling_re_inequitable_conduct.pdf
  25. ^ http://www.gracenote.com/corporate/legal/gracenote_v_musicmatch_settled.pdf
  26. ^ http://www.gracenote.com/corporate/legal/gracenote_v_musicmatch_order_to_vacate.pdf
  27. ^ http://news.com.com/Yahoo+to+launch+its+own+music+player/2100-1027_3-5372075.html

External links

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