Initial lawsuit After Gracenote's change in licensing,
Roxio made the decision to find another free music-recognition provider. In response to the competition, Gracenote filed a lawsuit with the patent at the base of its claims. Gracenote, company that owns CDDB database, has filed a lawsuit against Roxio, Adaptec'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 similar open-source database called FreeDB.org. Gracenote says that FreeDB, and therefore also Roxio, violates its patents and trademarks. Roxio filed a motion to dismiss the case on the ground that the patent claim by Gracenote was invalid due to
prior art. The court granted the motion and agreed in part, rendering one patent in question invalid due to prior art.
Countersuit In June 2001, Roxio filed a countersuit against Gracenote. They asserted that Gracenote fraudulently obtained U.S. Patent 6061680 and its CDDB trademark by failing to disclose certain key information to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. On May 17, 2001, Gracenote filed a motion for a temporary restraining order seeking to block Roxio from shipping certain of its products. On May 24, 2001, the Court denied Gracenote's request finding that Gracenote failed to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits.
Settlement Roxio and Gracenote signed an agreement making Gracenote the exclusive CD-recognition service for Roxio's software. In this way, Roxio was able to maintain access to the CDDB that they (and their customers) had relied on, while Gracenote was able to maintain access to their customer-base through Roxio without having to compete with free online databases. ==Notes and references==