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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."
I came across something like this through work. I was helping to organise a physics conference in Berlin. We were using a town map website to mark the conference venue. I entered the address of the place, copied the url (with all the cgi after it), and made a link so that the visitors could navigate to the map website and immediately get a big red cross on it. Our legal experts told me to get rid of the link because we could face a law suit for improper use of linking to other people's material (even though the huge ad banner still shows viagra and goodness knows what else all around the map, and the visitors were therefore contributing to the ad revenue). It's all fucking bullshit if you ask me.
This message was scanned by European governments and contains no terrorism.
Mod it flamebait if you wish, but does anyone actually believe a multi-billion dollar publicly traded corporation is not going to protect it's interests, even if it does occassionally mean doing evil? To me this is unfortunate but not unexpected. People treat Google as if the entity itself was open source. It's not. If it suits them they will restrict usage, pull products etc. as it suits them. PR is just that. PR.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
According to the post, it's quite simple. Google has a license to use their API with the data. It's not google being a bully. It's google saving their rear.
Google News is using stories from online sources without a license. When will Google itself cease and desist?
Fair use does not involve using a sublicensed product against the terms of the license agreement. When you spend the money to photograph and map the surface of the Earth you can license it and do with it what you please. Until then you have to deal with the licenses Google Earth's data falls under or not use it. Google is actually being pretty generous in providing a Google Earth/Maps API as they're going out on a limb licensing content from other vendors. There's a reason all of the images have Google logo watermarks or watermarks of the company that collected the data.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Google doesn't own most of the map data they're using-- they've bought licenses allowing them to use it in certain ways and Gaia was causing Google to violate those agreements. If Google's data suppliers had cut off their contracts over this, then both Google Earth and Gaia would cease to exist.
But what if the open source project was doing something it wasn't supposed to? Since when does open-source mean "free reign to do anything we please"?
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
There has never been a time when 2 corporate entities, Google and Apple, have been as beloved and cherished by the public as we have today. It's a true sign of unprecidented respect for a corporation when users obey the corporation's every request without as much as a wimper. If it was Microsoft, the kids would be screaming and it would be on every blog. Google is so beloved, they could tell kids to shoot themselves and they'd do it.
The project was accessing data that Google did not own, only licensed, in a way that was not covered by Google's license. If Google hadn't shut them down, the owners of the data would likely have gone after this project (and possibly gone straight to a lawsuit) as well as tried to force Google to make it harder for other people to do this in the future, thus limiting what Google itself can do with the data.
It sucks, but that's what happens when you're dealing with licensed data.
What? The agreement was that Google had paid for and been granted access to the map data, and Google users were therefore permitted to use the resulting application. Someone else developing an API to access that map data (held by Google in proxy to the original data) is bypassing the Google interface to get to the data, to which they have no license or access rights.
This isn't a grey area. A grey area would be someone writing a page which hooks into Google's API. This bypasses Google's and substitutes their own--Google can't facilitate redistribution of the raw map data to the rest of the world for free; they'd be forced to shut down Google Earth entirely.
A growing chunk of the world is going on with their lives ignoring intellectual property completely, and even though I make my living through payments for intellectual property, I am perfectly happy to see the entire IP structure collapse. It's based on some bad assumptions and ultimately destructive conventions.
I, for one, am pleased to walk down the streets of Belgrade and see "Nike" shoes for 5 dollars (US) and slipstreamed copies of Windows XP professional SP2 for less than that. I've made the decision to circumvent the laws of Intellectual Property whenever I can. I look forward to the whole thing blowing up and a new model taking its place (even though there's a chance it could be a worse model).
The direction IP law is taking us goes to a very bad place.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This scenario is a compelling case for open dependencies. Depending on a proprietary data source, like Google's GIS data, is a risk that can destroy a project when that source on which the project depends changes its terms of use, or turns out too limited to use by the project's actual scope or use cases. If Gaia were coded to use an open standard for data, then its developers could probably use Google data as one source during its development. The release could then use whichever data source the user specified. The most Google could do would be to insist the project stop specifying Google as a default source, and maybe stop users from connecting to the Google API.
Though that would encourage a good project (if Gaia is one) to grow the popularity of other data sources that compete with Google. So Google would probably go along with it.
Including tiered architectures with choices for alternative components and data in standard formats is a powerful way to force even a powerful force like Google to go with the flow.
--
make install -not war
Google apologists? WTF
After reading several posts, more people are standing up to defend Google and their control of their IP. That is fine, but if the article was about MS or another 'evil' corporate company doing this, we would see 1000 posts by now telling the world how evil they are.
What surprises me, is when I see the same people decry Microsoft or IBM and then in related issues stick up for companies like Google and Apple. These companies are all out for their own interest, give back only what 'little' they 'have' to give back and don't give a crap about OSS.
If you look back at tons of articles, where Apple stops giving back source, closes Darwin, or straps on tons of DRM and closes their entire media business to just themselves; or articles where Google admits to data mining email and has some 'unknown-unholy' alliance to firefox that controls the development of the browser and people just roll over like these are all ok things and people still think these companies are good and all about being Open.
Google is not any better than any other corporate machine, and as they get bigger their weight will be felt more and more by the entire industry.
Google is not about cute kittens any more than MS is about cute kittens.
Ok?
There is a story here because Google asked nicely, explaining why they thought Gaia was a big no-no to them. They didn't send in the lawyers.
More amazingly, the Gaia people understood Google's reasoning and complied, even though that meant canning many hours of work.
Please note that it is not an open-and-shut case here that what Gaia was doing was illegal, only detrimental to Google.
Intelligence at work is something worth telling sometime.
Heh, it's clear you're not working for e.g NAVTEQ, TANA, or TeleAtlas. In that case you'd say the opposite.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
They built an API to access google earth data in a different way. The license says you can only access the data via googles client software. But the Gaia project itself is not violating the license, they are just providing the means. Its the people that use the Gaia API that do the violation. This is just like a manufacture of a CD burner. A CD burner can be illegally used to copy copyrighted material, but it is the user of the CD burner that's breaking the license, not the CD manufacturer
While there can be differences of opinion over whether it was right for Google to make the request, they sure made it with a lot more tact than many companies have in the past. No threats. No blustering. No legal speak. It was a very reasonable letter that respects the recipient's intelligence and moral integrity.
I'm impressed.
Let's face it, after 10 minutes farting around, it's nothing much any way. No loss here, see ya. Google didn't even develop it.
There is a fundamental assumption of the web, which google seem to have misunderstood. It is this:
"Anything you publish, I can use. In return, anything I publish, you can use".
for example, I make my website accessible to googlebot without restriction (including indexing, caching etc). In return, google is available to me. It's simply about fairness: the "price of entry to the Internet" is that one should contribute one's own material.
This is how, for example, people share html layouts. The unfortunate thing is that this combination of reciprocity, fair-use and courtesy is not enshrined in law, and we persist in the ludicrous notion of "intellectual property".
Besides which, if google really want to do (and be seen to do) the right thing, they should offer gaia a blanket license. Fortunately, gaia is free-software, and it will get forked if necessary. It's time google had some stiff competition.
Using karma bonus so everyone sees this:
AC (parent) posted:
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.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Tell that to Daniel Brandt, creator of scroogle.org.
Google is at least several orders of magnitude more evil than Microsoft, the only difference is PR.
Brin and Page started immediately with the Orwellian doublespeak. Like the US government naming their War Department the Department of Defense, they make their motto "Don't be evil", while doing all manner of evil things. They record everything you've ever searched on, your emails on gmail, they know who your friends are, they actively hire and work with the NSA and CIA, they decide what are newsworthy sources, what sections of news you care about, and what should be news on any given day.
And while all this is going on, they are running defense by publicizing that google refuses subpoenas. How noble! As if that is going to make the slightest difference to how the government tracks the citizenry, Democrat or Republican. The only difference is that the illusion of google being "unmicrosoft-like" is maintained. If the government wants the information, it's going to get it.
And as far as the government is concerned, if google didn't exist it would have to be invented. The one stop shop of information gathering, profiling and opinion shaping. Reality to most people is rapidly becoming the first 10 search results of any google search and the daily google news page. That's a scary thought.
Just as scary is the profiling. It would be trivial to compile a list of crimes and or suspects, and match the reason for suspicion/type of crime with their search history. Just do a large enough sample, maybe ten thousand people. Correlate the search terms with the crimes and suspects. Now for the general populace, add up the frequencies of search terms, multiply by the high correlations found in your previous experiment, and you have an easily ranked list of who to watch.
The moment there is large scale unrest, guess who gets a one way ticket to Guantanamo, guilty or otherwise. It's just like Stalin executing the Polish Officers at Katyn forest, only more precise. Rather than liquidate anyone who could mount resistance, this way you can leave the docile (or paranoid) intelligentsia. You will need someone to run your factories, after all.
Google is capable of orders of magnitude more evil than Microsoft. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But they have a nice uncluttered UI, and different colored letters! How cute! And isn't google earth cool!
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.