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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 used to work for one of the companies named in those watermarks, who provides GIS datasets of the US and a few other countries. They purchase datasets from smaller companies/localities and merge and improve them to provide data to Google, in-car nav companies, and routing for businesses. One dataset that we had purchased from a county government cost the company $30,000. Almost all of the datasets required the company to agree to a Data Usage Agreement. Every street, water, rail, etc. segment that was modified in our database was tagged with the source of the data. I designed the database that cataloged those datasets, imagery, and maps to record the restrictions of each dataset. I was not privy to our sales contracts, but I would assume sales to Google involved passing along many of the same Data Usage Agreements, for a much larger amount of data and of course a much larger sum of money.
And our work probably wasn't nearly as expensive as sending satellites into space like the data from Space Imaging. Their Data Usage Agreements are likely even more limiting, and their data more expensive. My former employer buys satellite images from Space Imaging and more accurate aerial imagery from USGS flyovers to improve the accuracy of their GIS datasets, but they do not produce or distribute the images themselves.
Google did the right thing in abiding by the contracts they signed to license the data from companies like mine. We are already fortunate enough that Google absorbs the cost of that data to provide it through their API like they do, and that Google even managed to negotiate a contract allowing its use through their API.