AfterDawn: News

GraceNote, company that owns CDDB database, has filed a lawsuit against Roxio, Adapatec's spin-off company that develops Easy CD Creator (the most popular CD burning program in the world). Lawsuit is about GraceNote's CD recognition system; Roxio/Adaptec has used the technology in its Easy CD Creator and has paid all the licensing fees as they were supposed to, but now they didn't continue their contract that expired 22nd of April with GraceNote and have plans to use similiar open-source database called FreeDB.org. GraceNote says that FreeDB, and therefor also Roxio, violates its patents and trademarks.

Timing of the lawsuit couldn't be worse -- Roxio is spinning-off from its parent company Adaptec, world leader in SCSI technology, and will begin trading in Nasdaq on Monday. Roxio doesn't want to comment the lawsuit because they haven't received a copy of it yet.



GraceNote's database is used for CD recognition -- users put their audio CDs in their CD-ROM drives, open a program that uses CDDB database and they'll see the CD information, such as artist, album and track names, instead of "Track1", "Track2", etc.. GraceNote's technology is used widely in audio players, encoders, etc. Using GraceNote's database is free for freeware software developers, but not for those who develop commercial programs. GraceNote's client list is impressive, including AOL, RealNetworks and MusicMatch.


Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 11 May 2001 3:00