Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

FWIW, Google doesn't particularly like it when people use APIs outside the terms, either. Having to take down an app is never fun or enjoyable for anyone involved. And the cases in which the terms aren't programmatically enforced right away isn't necessarily a choice; often it is difficult to differentiate at scale between legitimate usage and disallowed usage.

And while I don't know how every other company writes their developer Terms of Services, I do know that in Google's case we measure each word carefully and try hard to strike the right balance between offering as much as feasibly possible, while trying to create something long-term sustainable (so even if the usage grows far beyond our initial goals, we're still in a position to keep them available). We're hardly perfect at it yet, but we're certainly getting a lot better over time.

Also worth noting, often times these terms are designed to honor upstream data contracts, so if for no other reason, it's worth trying to respect them because it's the right thing to do for the other relatively small parties, too.

I was thinking the same thing. Lots of people get the first part. But not so much with the second part.

If there is an actual click-through and the license is understandable by a human, perhaps. Usually there is neither, though.

I rarely even know how to look up terms of an API, or that there is an API. If I know the name of the API, I can look for "Google Foo API", but that name isn't always obvious. If I just see a URL with an obvious schema, and I change the HTTP GET parameters to retrieve different stuff, am I allowed to use that in, say, a small-scale art project, or not? The usual internet default is that public URLs are implicitly giving blanket permission to retrieve them, except that retrieval by spiders should abide by robots.txt. Google itself makes heavy use of this ok-to-retrieve default assumption.

If I go to http://maps.google.com there is no license presented to me as a condition of using the service. I can however look for fine print and seek out the link "Terms of Service" of my own accord, at which point I get this: http://www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/help/terms_maps.html

Those terms specifically forbid several things I'm definitely not doing (mass-downloading data, using it for turn-by-turn navigation, etc.), so my first read of it makes it sound like grabbing Maps content in my art project is okay. But then I'm not a lawyer, so maybe it isn't okay.

It's rate limited for a reason and every other so called "better alternative" will have some sort of limitations in place, if they want to stay in business. Nothing is for free. By saying people will just magically make a free, unlimited API service as long as people stop using Google's is dumb.

From the article: "I’m not RMS, I love open-source for very pragmatic reasons. One of the biggest is that I hate hitting black boxes when I’m debugging!"

RMS started the free software movement because he wasn't able to adapt a black box printer.