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Comment by kinduff | Hacker News Reader

I've been a contributor to the project and I've been using it for years. I love the community effort.

Similar projects are also the TMDB (The Movie Database) and TVDB (Television and Film Database).

The problem with those tv and movie databases are that they’re owned by Roku and you can’t download any data dumps…you’re also relying on the good graces of a corporation that can cut you off whenever it feels like it. That was the case with IMDb and I’m still upset about that :/

Dare I invoke the CDDB transition to Gracenote and their kidnapping and subsequent licensing and gatekeeping of a swathe of publically provided data.

Could CDDB and similar have prevented such things with better licenses?

I think the only way to avoid a CDDB is to make the entire database downloadable so that someone, or a group of someones, is able to re-create it in case of disaster.

I think in the case of "great, open service" selling, the new buyer can just change the licensing, and you're out of luck. If there is a license that compels them to maintain some level of availability, you can trust them to cut it down to the absolute minimum, including rate limiting access down to a level of pointlessness.

Yes, if I remember correctly it was one of the reasons the CC licenses were created? But I could be remembering wrong.

Yes, that is why the MetaBrainz Foundation was created - good luck “purchasing” the MusicBrainz database :)

A sibling comment points out Roku ownership. A more similar project might be the Open Media Database[0].

[0] = https://www.omdb.org

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