By Rachel Chalmers
When home electronics company Escient acquired the internet music database company CDDB LLC in August 1998, it probably didn’t realize what it was getting itself into. Virtually all PCs that recognize compact disks access CDDB’s digital catalog of around a quarter of a million CDs, which can be sorted by title, track and artist name. At the time, Escient promised that from the developers’ point of view, CDDB would remain more or less unchanged.
The devil is in the details, and when those developers opened their mail on the morning of Monday March 8 1999, they found a letter from Escient containing the license agreement. Programmers were outraged over what they saw as Escient’s onerous terms. The company wants developers to ensure that when a player accesses the CDDB, a logo will be displayed for at least two seconds. In addition, every player must include a link to Escient’s web site and a mail icon. Escient also demands exclusivity; developers who use CDDB may not use any other music database.
Internet developers being what they are, opposition to the license soon took on tangible form. By Tuesday morning, the Goodnoise Corp’s Freeamp.org was hosting the CD Index Project: designed to replace the badly designed and even worse administered CDDB project. Goals for the CD Index include source code release under the General Public License (GPL), eventual inclusion of MP3s and avoidance of legal tangles with CDDB: This likely means we’ll need to re-enter all the data… Oh, and one minor detail: We have no data. But if we pull the Open Source community together, we can get everybody to help us populate our server quickly. By the time ComputerWire went to press, the CD Index had 1000 albums.
