When the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra sent out a promotional CD recently, they were horrified to discover the song titles replaced by pornographic descriptions of sex acts. It appears that this occurred when some helpful volunteer uploaded their version of the track listing to commercial CD database cddb.com. Yes, the same cddb.com which took a free, volunteer-collected database, fenced it off and locked out free clients, and which relies on unpaid submissions from users to build up its proprietary database. As they say, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

Apparently the New Zealand police are looking into it, and various parties are crying "hacking" and looking for someone to prosecute. Is it a crime to volunteer incorrect data to cddb.com?

Posted by: Graham | http://grudnuk.com | Mon Oct 7 11:39:51 2002

Funny.

I dunno. I prefer to use freedb.org instead; it may well be just as fallible, but at least there's not the the propriety feel about it.

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Mon Oct 7 12:41:27 2002

Me too. Unfortunately, the contract CDDB requires of software manufacturers requires them to hardwire it to CDDB, and make it difficult to change; this is the case with iTunes. When I ripped CDs on my PowerBook at work, I made sure not to submit anything to the greedy scumbags.

These days, I rip CDs under Linux with grip, which of course uses freedb, so the point is moot.

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