RED HERRING | Gracenote Frees Lyrics

“We’ve been in a real catch-22 situation,” noted Nick Firth, chairman and chief executive of BMG Music Publishing, which has signed with Gracenote. “It’s kind of difficult to go after the illegal sites when you haven’t got a legal alternative.”

Of course, music publishers are not the same thing as the recording industry. But it’s still nice to see some of them state what seemed obvious to most of us.

In the Buzz Out Loud podcast in which they mentioned this story, they also alluded to the fact that Gracenote reappropriated the CDDB from a community project into a commercial site with very harsh usage restriction. Similar things happened with several of the early community-built online projects, including IMDb (though the IMDb remained somewhat more community-friendly). Will the whole “Web 2.0” projects avoid CDDB and IMDb’s fate?