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Gaia Project Agrees To Google Cease and Desist
Dreben writes "Gaia, an opensource project to develop a 3D API to Google Earth, has decided to comply with a request from Google. The search giant's Chief Technologist, Michael Jones, contacted the project with a request to cease and desist from all past, present and future development of the Gaia project. Amongst other things, they cited 'improper usage of licensed data,' which Google licenses from assorted third party vendors. They are going so far as to request anyone who has ever downloaded any aspect of Gaia to purge all related files. From the post to the freegis-l mail list: 'We understand and respect Google's position on the case, so we've removed all downloads from this page and we ask everybody who have ever downloaded gaia 0.1.0 and prior versions to delete all files concerned with the project, which include source code, binary files and image cache (~/.gaia).' How does such a request, likely to have turned into a demand, affect fair usage? While the API is intended to interface with the the Google Earth service, Google Earth is nothing without the data. Yet at the same time, Google openly publishes their own API which uses the same data in the same manner."
"While the API is intended to interface with the the Google Earth service, Google Earth is nothing without the data. Yet at the same time, Google openly publishes their own API which uses the same data in the same manner."
Yes - Google Earth is nothing without the data. That's why they pay huge sums of money for that data. They intend to make a return on this investment - and I'm sure anybody with Google shares would expect them to do so.
To make a return they want people to use it. To get more people to use it they developed an API - the usage of which they intend to ultimately bring money back to Google with.
Why on earth would they want other people ripping off the data they paid to license to do other stuff with - something that doesn't return them money. More importantly, whoever is licensing them the data isn't going to be too happy that other people are copying it without paying them a license fee. If I wrote some software and sold copies to people, and one of my customers started burning copies and giving them out to everybody, I would be pissed off with that customer.
If Gaia wants to use the maps, I'm sure the OSS community will collectively reach into their pockets to pay for the licensing fee required (that would be the fee required to distribute those maps free, to anybody). Alternatively, why don't we send up an OSS satellite ourselves and take our own photos?
I fail to see how this is a story..
They had no contractual license to the map data. I'm going to splice into your phone line and use it to make my calls from now on. You're paying the phone company and I'm not, but I have no contractual obligation to either of you, so I must not be breaking any laws.
I'm on the Google Earth team and yes, this is exactly what happened. The license we have to the imagery forbids us from allowing access from unofficial clients. The data providers take this very seriously indeed and noticed very quickly that such an application was out in the wild.
Fortunately, the Gaia author understood our position and ceased development, for which we are grateful. I think we are going to send him a T-Shirt or something to try and make up for it. It's a small gesture but we don't want him to think badly of us.
I guess some people will see this action as us dumping on the little guy, but it's not that simple. Many Googlers have a background in open source and have been on both sides of the fence. However, the fact remains that this sort of aerial imagery is not only very expensive to produce but also very expensive to manipulate and merge into a unified "Earth". If we allowed open source clients to access the Earth database it would be easier to dump the (unwatermarked) images en-masse and avoid paying the imagery owners for it. Clearly, that's not something anybody wants - satellites don't launch themselves.
The data that we license for Google Earth and Google Maps is made available for use under the restriction that it not be accessed or used outside of Google's client software.
In other words, they got a license for the images, data, whatever only for use in their software. The original providers of that data would - understandably - be unhappy if they allowed the data to be used by other products (remember, they want to keep selling the data to people). So Google has to be the "bad guy" and pull the plug from the 3rd party devs or the data providers will sue them for allowing others to take the data and/or pull the plug on Google's license.
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++