[Edit to add] Yes, you're right. When I compare their map side-by-side the same area in maps.google.com they are clearly different. I should have looked more carefully before asking my question. So I guess my question should be "If they had the exact same page except using a Google map, would they be in compliance?" - It's not clear to me in what way the "Crime doesn't climb" page violates the quoted terms of use. Wo…
Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
51–60 of 117 posts
Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
More to the point -- regardless of the specifics of the law, the persistent desire of this forum to correlate legality to moral correctness is somewhat disturbing. What does it even mean to form an agreement with "Google"? Even assuming the historical basis of contract law, what constitutes "consideration" in an agreement like this?
Personally... I don't see any ethical reason to perform negotiations with organizations that have become as large and as disconnected as Google. I speak to employee after employee and they all speak of Google's commitment to privacy, to openness, to not doing evil; but the actions of Google at every turn display otherwise. A man can make an agreement with another man or perhaps even with an organization that is capable of coherent action, but Google is neither. No "agreement" with Google is valid if only because Google is not a collective that one can actually negotiate with, never mind that it's proven time and time again willing to discard agreements and promises in the name of profit.
Finally, the statement is often made that if one chooses not to consider Google as an entity with which one can negotiate, one should simply not utilize their resources. Why? Because we can't negotiate with a mountain, should we fail to mine the minerals therein? Google is a mound of computational power and data with no remaining hold on human morality or ethics -- anything we can retrieve from there is salvage. Take it and use for the betterment of humanity, because they certainly will not be doing so.
Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I think you're confusing accessing a public version of their data with accessing their API, which this thread is about. When you use maps.google.com you are NOT agreeing to any terms, because they don't really require any to use their data on their site, but when you use the API, you're required to agree to their terms before being able to use it.
If so, looking at whatever data's on your wire (browsers are subclass of user-agents for a reason), and then doing similar requests by example does not make you sign some agreement with Google, right?
Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
#541. The TOS aren't heavily enforced; thus 2. No one I work for cares about complying with the TOS; thus 3. No one is particularly supportive of my spending additional time to work within the TOS.
Using and contributing work time or resources to an open source project is going to be a hard sell until there is some pressure on the business end to change. Having our data sources cut off, or having to reimplement on different providers would help.
Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
#55[Edit to add] Yes, you're right. When I compare their map side-by-side the same area in maps.google.com they are clearly different. I should have looked more carefully before asking my question. So I guess my question should be "If they had the exact same page except using a Google map, would they be in compliance?" - It's not clear to me in what way the "Crime doesn't climb" page violates the quoted terms of use. Wo…
The map in question looks like it's actually from Yahoo! Maps: http://maps.yahoo.com/
Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The map in question looks like it's actually from Yahoo! Maps: http://maps.yahoo.com/
I don't think so, it says Nokia in the bottom right, along with CartoDB: http://cartodb.com
CartoDB is not a map provider, it's a web-based GIS suite that lets you import different base layers.
Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're confusing accessing a public version of their data with accessing their API, which this thread is about. When you use maps.google.com you are NOT agreeing to any terms, because they don't really require any to use their data on their site, but when you use the API, you're required to agree to their terms before being able to use it.
Aren't the same exact APIs are serving as backend to that "public version"? If so, looking at whatever data's on your wire (browsers are subclass of user-agents for a reason), and then doing similar requests by example does not make you sign some agreement with Google, right?
Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
#58FWIW, 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 o…
It'd be one thing for Google to be deceptive about it, offer a free service, and try to upsell you every point along the way. It's quite another thing for Google to dedicate an entire section in the API intro page [1] about Usage Limits.
Saying that "Google has nobody to blame but itself" is interesting when the blame is usually from developers to Google, not the other way around.
[1] https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/elevation/
Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
#59FWIW, 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…
At least in this cited case, it was a throwaway project that won't be around, but folks who copy the code may be in for a shock.
Re: Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
#60Earlier 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…
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 t…