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Gracenote Licensing Controversy
Music information company Gracenote changed its database terms to closed-source in 2001. This caused some controversy because Gracenote's ancestor, CDDB, had previously said its database was released under the GPL. In 1998, CDDB was purchased by Escient, a consumer electronics manufacturer, and operated as a business unit within the Indiana-based company. CDDB was then spun off of Escient and in July 2000 was renamed Gracenote. In 1999, freedb, an open source clone of the Gracenote CDDB service, was created by former CDDB users as 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 later changed to include new terms. For instance, any programs using a CDDB lookup had to display a CDDB logo while performing the lookup. In March 2001, only licensed applications were provided access to the Gracenote database. New licenses for CDDB1 (the original version of CD ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gracenote
Gracenote, Inc. is a company owned by Nielsen Holdings that provides music, video and sports metadata and automatic content recognition (ACR) technologies to entertainment services and companies, worldwide. Formerly CDDB ("Compact Disc Data Base"), Gracenote maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs and vinyl records. History Gracenote began in 1993 as an open-source project involving a CD player program named xmcd and an associated database named CDDB. xmcd and CDDB were created by Ti Kan and Steve Scherf. Because CDs do not contain any digitally-encoded information about their contents, Kan and Scherf devised a technology that identifies and looks up CDs based on TOC information stored at the beginning of each disc. A TOC, or Table of Contents, is a list of offsets corresponding to the start of each track on a CD. Its original database was created from and continues to receive voluntary contribution ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CDDB
CDDB, short for Compact Disc Database, is a database for software applications to look up audio CD (compact disc) information over the Internet. This is performed by a client which calculates a (nearly) unique disc ID and then queries the database. As a result, the client is able to display the artist name, CD title, track list and some additional information. CDDB is a licensed trademark of Gracenote, Inc. The database is used primarily by media players and CD ripper software. If a CD is not recognized by a media player or CD ripper it can be added to the database if the user fills in the names and artists etc. in a media player such as iTunes or MusicMatch Jukebox. The need for CDDB is a direct consequence of the original design of the CD, which was conceived as an evolution of the gramophone record, and did not consider the audio tracks as data files to be identified and indexed. The audio CD format does not include the disc name or track names, so a supplemental database i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Richard Stallman, for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the GNU Lesser General Public License, Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD licenses, BSD, MIT License, MIT, and Apache License, Apache. Historically, the GPL license family has been one of the most popular software licenses in the free and open ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Escient
Escient was a division of D&M Holdings, which manufactured high-end, centralized, internet-connected home AV equipment. The Escient trademark was registered with the (now defunct) Digital Networks North America. Escient's main product lines were movie managers, music managers, media players, and other peripherals. The FireBall brand provides up to a 750 GB hard drive for central music storage. It has the ability control as many as 2000 DVDs or CDs through a graphical user interface. Escient's home media servers are supplemented with networked digital remote players for whole-house audio. The FireBall-PC software runs on Mac and Windows computers to share media collections throughout the home. The wireless web pad can browse the internet, stream audio from the FireBall web servers, access the FireBall servers remotely via 802.11b wireless networking, and replace the FireBall TV interface. In April, 2010, D&M Holdings, Inc. discontinued the Escient brand.D&M Holdings Press Re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indiana
Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th state on December 11, 1816. It is bordered by Lake Michigan to the northwest, Michigan to the north, Ohio to the east, the Ohio River and Kentucky to the south and southeast, and the Wabash River and Illinois to the west. Various indigenous peoples inhabited what would become Indiana for thousands of years, some of whom the U.S. government expelled between 1800 and 1836. Indiana received its name because the state was largely possessed by native tribes even after it was granted statehood. Since then, settlement patterns in Indiana have reflected regional cultural segmentation present in the Eastern United States; the state's northernmost tier was settled primarily by people from New England and New York, Central Indiana by migrants fro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Corporate Spin-off
A corporate spin-off, also known as a spin-out, or starburst or hive-off, is a type of corporate action where a company "splits off" a section as a separate business or creates a second incarnation, even if the first is still active. Characteristics Spin-offs are divisions of companies or organizations that then become independent businesses with assets, employees, intellectual property, technology, or existing products that are taken from the parent company. Shareholders of the parent company receive equivalent shares in the new company in order to compensate for the loss of equity in the original stocks. However, shareholders may then buy and sell stocks from either company independently; this potentially makes investment in the companies more attractive, as potential share purchasers can invest narrowly in the portion of the business they think will have the most growth. In contrast, divestment can also sever one business from another, but the assets are sold off rather t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Freedb
Freedb was a database of compact disc track listings, where all the content was under the GNU General Public License. To look up CD information over the Internet, a client program calculated a hash function from the CD table of contents and used it as a disc ID to query the database. If the disc was in the database, the client was able to retrieve and display the artist, album title, track list and some additional information. It was originally based on the now-proprietary CDDB (Compact Disc DataBase). Because it inherited the CDDB limitations, there is no data field in the Freedb database for composer. This limits its usefulness for classical music CDs. Furthermore, CDs in a series are often introduced in the database by different people, resulting in inconsistent spelling and naming conventions across discs. the database held just under 2,000,000 CDs. As of 2007, MusicBrainz – a project with similar goals – had a Freedb gateway that allowed access to their own database. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open-source License
An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial companies to review and modify the source code, blueprint or design for their own customization, curiosity or troubleshooting needs. Open-source licensed software is mostly available free of charge, though this does not necessarily have to be the case. Licenses which only permit non-commercial redistribution or modification of the source code for personal use only are generally not considered as open-source licenses. However, open-source licenses may have some restrictions, particularly regarding the expression of respect to the origin of software, such as a requirement to preserve the name of the authors and a copyright statement within the code, or a requirement to redistribute the licensed software only under the same license (as in a copy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Roxio
Roxio is an American software company specializing in developing consumer digital media products. Its product line includes tools for setting up digital media projects, media conversion software and content distribution systems. The company formed as a spin-off of Adaptec's software division in 2001 and acquired MGI Software in 2002. Sonic Solutions acquired Roxio in 2003, going on to acquire Simple Star and CinemaNow in 2008. Rovi Corporation acquired Sonic Solutions in 2010, but Rovi announced in January 2012 that it would sell Roxio to Canadian software company Corel. That acquisition closed on February 7, 2012. Products * Roxio Creator * Roxio Toast Roxio Toast is an optical disc authoring and media conversion software application for Mac OS X. Its name is a play on the word ''burn'', a term used for the writing of information onto a disc through the use of a laser. Discs can be burned di ... * Easy VHS to DVD * Easy LP to MP3 * Popcorn * DVDitPro * PhotoShow * Recor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
21st-century Controversies
The 1st century was the century spanning AD 1 (Roman numerals, I) through AD 100 (Roman numerals, C) according to the Julian calendar. It is often written as the or to distinguish it from the 1st century BC (or BCE) which preceded it. The 1st century is considered part of the Classical era, epoch, or History by period, historical period. The 1st century also saw the Christianity in the 1st century, appearance of Christianity. During this period, Europe, North Africa and the Near East fell under increasing domination by the Roman Empire, which continued expanding, most notably conquering Britain under the emperor Claudius (AD 43). The reforms introduced by Augustus during his long reign stabilized the empire after the turmoil of the previous century's civil wars. Later in the century the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which had been founded by Augustus, came to an end with the suicide of Nero in AD 68. There followed the famous Year of Four Emperors, a brief period of civil war and inst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
