Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

petewarden.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 117 posts

Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

#31

Post by wisty »

revelation wrote: post #6
TallGuyShort wrote: post #2

Here's another reason that I wish was more prevalently discussed: it's not okay to violate Terms of Service anyway. Don't accept the terms? Don't use the service. We'd all have a field day if "big brother" violated the terms of an open-source license, but the freedom we enjoy in the community comes with a responsibility to honor our agreements.

Violating the terms of a license is very different to violating the Terms of service you "sign" with a button click.

OK, so on the one hand there's white (or grey) hat cases, and on the other there's spammers and scammers. Both break the ToS.

I think a big difference is whether it's for commercial purposes, or has some evil motive. Eating KFC in McDonalds is probably breaking some rule, but no-one in their right mind would really care. Selling your own fried chicken in McDonalds is much more likely to lead to trouble. A political stunt is somewhere in between, but should generally be given a bit of lenience.

So I'd say it should be OK to use a script to automate some personal task. Creating a business which relies on breaching a ToS is both wrong and stupid. And while political hacks might be a bad idea, they might also be the right thing to do.

Here's the thing about the law - it's not quite black and white. A judge or jury will always consider the circumstances, when they decide what to do with you. The same is true about companies blocking you. Sometimes, you need to use common sense, and hope that other people do to.

Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

#32

Post by TillE »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #5
Killswitch wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just wish people would stop being so self-entitled period.

Agreed. The tone of the article is correct, in my opinion, because this really does hurt the community. I think we'd have an easier time fighting things like SOPA, DRM, etc. if actual piracy wasn't such a big problem.

And if theft didn't exist, we wouldn't need police.

This is a useless observation. You may be able to effect a limited degree of societal change, but you will never satisfactorily eliminate the problem at its source. Other solutions are necessary.

Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

#33

Post by res0nat0r »

cinquemb wrote: post #30
res0nat0r wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculous. Playing dumb isn't an excuse. Can I stop paying my morgtage on my house because the 40 pages of documents I signed I don't 100% understand? No. If you want to enter a legally binding contract that you don't understand you hire someone to help you do so, or face the consequences if you signed something you were not smart enough to be signing.

Maybe if google (and all other companies with similar "walled" gardens) had a leg to stand on when it comes to data, one might be more inclined to care more to abide by their wishes… Playing dumb isn't an excuse; But if one were to juxtapose the consequences of ignoring google's wishes and not paying ones mortgage, that would seem ridiculous. And is accessing a url is a legally binding contract now, especially when n…

>And is accessing a url is a legally binding contract now, especially when nothing is signed or acknowledged by one or both parties when the url is accessed?

This is in no way comparable to using a companies API.

Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

#34

Post by res0nat0r »

_delirium wrote: post #29
res0nat0r wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculous. Playing dumb isn't an excuse. Can I stop paying my morgtage on my house because the 40 pages of documents I signed I don't 100% understand? No. If you want to enter a legally binding contract that you don't understand you hire someone to help you do so, or face the consequences if you signed something you were not smart enough to be signing.

> if you signed something you were not smart enough to be signing That's good advice, but I didn't sign anything here. I have in the past signed contracts with companies agreeing to use services or software in certain ways (generally pre-release stuff under NDA), and in those cases I do indeed read the contract carefully before signing it, sometimes redlining parts of it before they countersign, and I abide by our mu…

>However, to my knowledge, I have never signed a contract with Google.

To use their API you will need to agree to their TOS

https://developers.google.com/maps/licensing

Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

#35

Post by _delirium »

res0nat0r wrote: post #34
_delirium wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you signed something you were not smart enough to be signing That's good advice, but I didn't sign anything here. I have in the past signed contracts with companies agreeing to use services or software in certain ways (generally pre-release stuff under NDA), and in those cases I do indeed read the contract carefully before signing it, sometimes redlining parts of it before they countersign, and I abide by our mu…

>However, to my knowledge, I have never signed a contract with Google. To use their API you will need to agree to their TOS https://developers.google.com/maps/licensing

I have never visited that page. I have visited this one: http://maps.google.com

That webpage serves map tiles over HTTP, without asking me to agree to a contract first. I take it that I may therefore access the map tiles over HTTP? Obviously I assume I cannot redistribute them, as they're copyrighted. And it is good netiquette to observe robots.txt for bulk/crawl access. But beyond that I don't believe me visiting their page constitutes me "signing" a contract with Google, any more than Google visiting my page constitutes them "signing" a contract with me.

Perhaps there is some other API with nice JSON stuff and OAuth or whatever, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just doing HTTP GET requests for map tile URLs.

Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

#36

Post by baddox »

Killswitch wrote: post #3
TallGuyShort wrote: post #2

Here's another reason that I wish was more prevalently discussed: it's not okay to violate Terms of Service anyway. Don't accept the terms? Don't use the service. We'd all have a field day if "big brother" violated the terms of an open-source license, but the freedom we enjoy in the community comes with a responsibility to honor our agreements.

I just wish people would stop being so self-entitled period.

I feel like I deserve to live in a world with fewer self-entitled people.

Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

#37

Post by cinquemb »

res0nat0r wrote: post #33
cinquemb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if google (and all other companies with similar "walled" gardens) had a leg to stand on when it comes to data, one might be more inclined to care more to abide by their wishes… Playing dumb isn't an excuse; But if one were to juxtapose the consequences of ignoring google's wishes and not paying ones mortgage, that would seem ridiculous. And is accessing a url is a legally binding contract now, especially when n…

>And is accessing a url is a legally binding contract now, especially when nothing is signed or acknowledged by one or both parties when the url is accessed? This is in no way comparable to using a companies API.

Really? Found this[0] link on a site listed on this topic thread.

And like blog posts written by people on various subjects, one might click the links, find something of value from accessing the link and decide to access it in an automated fashion without caring (Oh, it has api in the url! * doesn't think twice about it *) to bother to look for anything else because as far as they are concerned, they're getting what they need right there. Now if they run into rate limits and get blocked for x amount of time, its tough luck. But if one doesn't run into rate limits, and continue to uses such a link, should they expect the 2 am wake up call or expect to get kicked out of their home or face significant hardships in life because of it?

[0] http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?sensor=fals...

Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

#38

Post by Mithaldu »

dewitt wrote: post #11

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 th…

I would have some sympathy with this if you made it easy for single people to pay you to be able to use your data in a manner outside of the ToS of the free APIs.

However, for the Elevation API there are two choices:

  * free and heavily restricted
  * business api, which looks extremely sketchy †
    and is blocked to most people
The gaming world has learned this with Steam and friends already. People will pirate the hell out of digital offerings that are not available in a reasonable manner. Steam recognized this and made games available in the most convenient manner humanly possible and are making money hand-over-fist. Sure, there are still pirates in gaming, but those are the people who are either paranoid about Steam or those who truly couldn't afford it anyhow.

You're still in this pre-realization phase and have only one single entity to blame if people "misuse" your APIs: Yourself. Make the APIs available for normal people in a reasonable manner and you will find adherence to your ToS becoming the norm, not the exception.

† By sketchy i mean the facts that there is zero pricing information, it's a buzzword-slaughterhouse, and the only way to get at it is to fill out a form with a lot of information, an indication of what one might want to do and which offers no further information or even actual flesh-and-blood human contact.

Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

#39

Post by jpatokal »

_delirium wrote: post #15
TallGuyShort wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I'd argue that you're more obligated to abide by something you explicitly checked "I have read and accepted..." than something that was listed somewhere in a file you downloaded with some other stuff. You probably just happen to like the terms of the GPL or ASL more than you like the terms of Google's API. I do too - but at what point are we just losing all integrity because we're too lazy to read a long doc…

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 all…

I'm not sure if you're being intentionally obtuse here, but maps.google.com is the public Google Maps website, while the Google Maps Javascript API lives at https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/. The very first page there says:

The JavaScript Maps API V3 is a free service, available for any web site that is free to consumers. Please see the terms of use for more information. ...with a link to the full TOS for the API: https://developers.google.com/maps/terms

Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs

#40

Post by mikeash »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #9
revelation wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violating the terms of a license is very different to violating the Terms of service you "sign" with a button click.

Actually I'd argue that you're more obligated to abide by something you explicitly checked "I have read and accepted..." than something that was listed somewhere in a file you downloaded with some other stuff. You probably just happen to like the terms of the GPL or ASL more than you like the terms of Google's API. I do too - but at what point are we just losing all integrity because we're too lazy to read a long doc…

You're not at all obligated to abide by an open source license that just happened to be bundled in with a bunch of files you downloaded.

The thing is, without that license, you're bound by copyright. That means you're not allowed to redistribute those files, or anything derived from them, at all without permission from the copyright holder, with the exception of uses allowed by fair use.

For source code and similar things, there's a default position which is highly restrictive, and the open source license loosens the restrictions. Nothing forces you to accept the license. It's just that you can do much less with the material if you don't.

Terms of Service are a completely different beast, because the default position is that you can use services that are mad public over the internet more or less however you feel like, as long as you don't violate copyright and such. The ToS then adds restrictions.

Post reply on HN