[OSM-legal-talk] Gracenoting
Robert (Jamie) Munro
rjmunro at arjam.net
Tue Feb 27 16:01:43 GMT 2007
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I was thinking about the CDDB / Gracenote case recently, and it occurred
to me that the problem was not caused by a private company taking all
the data and making a private copy for them to use, then charging people
to use that copy. The problem was that they owned the cddb domain name,
and the free dataset was forced on to another domain name (freedb.org)
which it took people time to find and learn about. The problem was not
the existence of a non-free copy of the data, it was that the non-free
data was at the formerly free data's location.
This implies that the license makes no difference at all (with respect
to "gracenoting"). If someone was to have bought the cddb domain names,
realised that they couldn't use the data, then bought in data from
AllMusic or some other source and used that, it would have been just as
bad (although possibly not quite as galling). Everyone still would have
had to seek out change their software to use FreeDB.
Therefore the solution to preventing Gracenoting is to make sure that
the domain name is not owned by an entity that can sell it. We should
make sure that the foundation is set up as such an entity. I'm not sure
how to do that. Probably this is something we can ask the CC lawyers.
Robert (Jamie) Munro
Ps. is it just me who keeps sending to talk-legal at openstreetmap.org,
like talk-gb etc. rather than legal-talk?
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