Gracenote: eminent domain over the public domain

Owners of the CDDB and related trademarks and copyrights, as well as a number of software patents related to music metadata lookup, Gracenote (a subsidiary of Escient, a media player manufacturer) took a database that had been built by music fans and turned it into a private company.

In addition to their appropriations, Gracenote has engaged in typical corporate behavior by suing various competitors (like MusicMatch ) and even customers (like Roxio, which allowed users to switch to FreeDB). The MusicMatch case is still in progress; there was a preliminary ruling in October 2004, discussed in this thread on the MailingList. The Roxio suit (described in this CNET article) was settled for an undisclosed amount in 2001.

There's a pretty biased , Escient, and FreeDB). More embarrassingly for the corporate Goliath, another Wired article puts the lie to their claims of accuracy and editing the data.