Attention, Amazon.com finance department: The good folks at MusicBrainz
sent you guys a cake to celebrate the third anniversary of you not paying your bill.
Congratulations?

© MusicBrainzMusicBrainz just sent this cake to Amazon HQ because of a 3-year unpaid invoice.
We first spotted the story over at
Boing Boing, which reports that "MetaBrainz is a charity that oversees
MusicBrainz, a free/open music metadata service" that acts as a free encyclopedia for music of all genres.
Apparently, three years ago, Amazon.com hired MusicBrainz for a roughly $20,000 project involving a live data feed. Unfortunately, invoice #144 never got paid.
Yahoo News spoke via email with Robert Kaye of MusicBrainz about cake-gate. "It wasn't that there was no communication," he said. "There was plenty, but all of the actions on Amazon's part were ineffectual. Nothing seemed to work and I wanted the organization on the greater whole to be aware of this problem and to work together to find a solution moving forward."
Kaye told Yahoo News that the people at Amazon with whom he's spoken have been polite and eager to help. "The real reason, from what I can tell, is that Amazon employees are constantly overworked and that MetaBrainz is such a small organization that its hard for them to really find the time to manage this relationship."
He continued, "No one was trying to stiff us. No one was trying to be in the way. It was never about the money. So, I'm not upset at Amazon or the people I dealt with. I'm just frustrated with the overall bureaucracy of that organization."