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."

Comments

I don't get it either

[localoptimum]

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.

Re:I don't get it either

[Anonymous Coward]

The more others give in, the more control companies will demand. If people stood up......., the less this BS would happen.

In your case, simply linking to a page available on a public webpage should not warrant a lawsuit - and if a lawsuit is bought, the plaintiff should be laughed out of court and properly fined for wasting everybody elses time and also jailed for the civil version of entrapment.

Re:I don't get it either

[Kagura]

... with a request to cease and desist from all past, present and future development of the Gaia project.

Sure, so long as you let us keep the time machine after we've complied!

Re:I don't get it either

[shawn443]

I operate under the notion that the web is a collection of documents linked together the hypertext transfer protocol. I feel no obligation to ask anyone's permission to use the web as intended. I will however be courteous and inform you of the link if I feel it will burden your bandwidth or hardware.

Re:I don't get it either

[daeg]

The data in question isn't HTML data, traditional linking doesn't really apply.

The data available through Google is not free-as-in-beer. There's no usage fee, but Google doesn't own the data, and they are only defending what they paid for. I would suspect that if these third-party data providers saw that Google wasn't defending their license agreement, they would jack Google's data fees or revoke their license altogether, thus ruining it for everyone, not just those of the Gaia project. Sometimes killing one project is worth it, even if it sucks for some of us.

I'm sure if Google had their own satellites and collected the data themselves and could use it any way they pleased, we would be in a slightly different situation: Google would simply hire the Gaia developers and make a slick product out of it.

Re:I don't get it either

[dextromulous]

Now you have me wondering, since Slashdot has contributed to large bandwidth bills for some websites, why don't we hear of Slashdot being in "legal trouble" for "improper use of linking ot other people's material." It sounds like what you were doing is not "improper use" at all, but IANAL, so maybe your legal experts are right... or maybe they're just a bunch of idiots when it comes to the Internet. Hotlinking, however, would be a different story.

Re:I don't get it either

[dextromulous]

HTTP is not the same as HTML. HTML is often served over HTTP, but AFAIK so are images, etc. Also, I believe the grand-parent-post was in reference to the original post in the thread, which was indeed talking about making a link to another site (not embedding someone else's data in his website.) Considering Google has gone out of their way to allow you to link directly to a map, why would it be wrong to post this link somewhere?

Re:I don't get it either

[sumdumass]

Slashdot has been accused of it before. At least we have seen stories about it on the main page. Not to the extent were it needed shut down or anything but it was neccesary once or twice for the editors to defend thier practice. I know this because I remeber the story submisions on it.

And It is a different concept from Slashdot linking to a"news" story with some comentary then discusing it later then someone using someone elses service as a feature of thier website to promote thier conference.

Now the bigest difference is probably that one is news and has a more liberal rules to what can be done with it. With a conference, It is all comercial promotion (even if the even is nonprofit). Of course, there was a big stink being made about it a while back and rules of acceptance were produced describing what you could or could not do with other peopels sites. It may be that the time frame for the GP was when all this was going on so it just added to the confusion.

Re:I don't get it either

[ByteofK]

German web law is different. They have some very weird laws when it comes to publishing a link to another site, from what I understand of it, if you do it without their permission you can be in trouble.

Re:I don't get it either

[Yez70]

Tell that to the Blegian courts who forced google to stop linking to news stories in their country. The traffic to their sites has diminished, so maybe the news sites learned their lesson - maybe not. I haven't heard of them begging google to crawl again them yet.

People are idiots.

Re:I don't get it either

[tubapro12]

If you build a big billboard along a superhighway saying "Joe's Diner: Chicken Sandwich $5" you shouldn't sue someone for saying "Joe's Diner has chicken sandwiches for $5." Its all information, its all 1s and 0s; it shouldn't matter whether its stored as a JPEG or an HTML, or a MP3 for that matter.

Re:I don't get it either

[Anonymous Coward]

If it somehow cost Joe's Diner $.30 every time someone took a picture, they certainly do have a say in who can take a picture.

Re:I don't get it either

[enosys]

I don't think it matters that it's http or that they're images. What matters is authentication is required. Sure, the data is free as in beer, but it's not free in any other sense and it is protected by something that might give it DMCA protection.

Re:I don't get it either

[FLEB]

It's not about information. Information does tend to be free. Your situation would likely not cause a conflict. However it is the representation of information that is defensible.

If I were to look on Google Maps and find that Joe's Diner is at 9th and Main, 2 blocks from the highway, I would have no trouble at all disseminating that information. However, if I were to print copies of the Google map, Google could claim infringement, because their representation of that data-- the value added that makes it more than just "facts"-- is being copied.

Maps themselves do have a bit more protection, in that although a map's shapes and features could be seen as the most distilled form of the geographical facts, copying a map, even without copying the style of the map, is an infringement.

As for satellite imagery, I believe there is case law that says that a CCTV security-cam image isn't considered protectible "intellectual property", since there was no creative force behind it, and such a thing may apply, but on a practical level, I seriously doubt that would hold up.

(USA, IANAL, YMMV)

Re:I don't get it either

[drDugan]

this is exactly why the concept of property as we know it (both IP and assigned physical stuff) will not work in a super-connected world.

there are only 2 ways to justify property rights: convention or information disequalibrium (not counting the "God" stuff)

if you go with property as social convention, then people will simply reject the convention

if you go with the info argument, then mass communication of all ideas breaks that one down

either way, people are going to have to start looking seriously into social systems without the concept of property

hope it's not to painful to change our story

Re:I don't get it either

[flight_master]

I agree. Big-business is becoming the Bolshevik Revolution of the 21st century. If the public stands up to large corporations, then they'll know their limits. If we all bow down to them, what's going to happen, is that they'll control what we watch, when we eat, sleep, and work, and what we talk about.

The web is a place for free content exchange. Linking to someone's website shouldn't cause a lawsuite (whatever happened to people who wanted you to link to their sites)?

Re:I don't get it either

[Prothonotar]

Whatever you may think of Google's request, you must agree that linking to a website and circumventing proprietary encryption and access control schemes in order to get direct access to data on Google's servers are two entirely different matters.

Re:I don't get it either

[Doctor O]

I'm German, so I can offer some informed comment. Actually, it's a bit different - according to German law you can be held resposible for the stuff you link to. This sounds reasonable until you look at the implementation of that idea. Basically, if you link to a site which has remotely questionable stuff even *elsewhere* (i.e. not on the page you're linking to), you can be into trouble. Even ads on the other side can get you into trouble, e.g. if there's explicit porn ads (which must not be shown to minors), you can get sued.

Effectively you are fully responsible for *everything on the whole site* you link to which lead to the epidemic outbreak of people including disclaimers on their sites which basically say "I dissociate from anything I link to", because there has been a rule of a German court that said you need to do so to avoid prosecution. I always found that hilarious because why would I be linking to ANYTHING then? (As for the epidemic, it's still going on. Google for "Urteil vom 12. Mai 1998" (the day of said stupid court rule), it still is at 1.070.000 results.)

FWIW, the disclaimers actually make things worse for you if you use them because if you get sued, the disclaimer is regarded as a sign you were fully aware of the legal situation. And you say the American legal system is weird. Well, ours is fucked as well. Don't get me talking about the legal bullshit concerning domain names.

Re:I don't get it either

[theLOUDroom]

What I want to know is: Where's my fucking check?

If you're going to take pictures of my property, without my permission and sell them for a profit, why aren't I getting paid?

All the arguments that Google apologists are making apply equally Google's use of MY property without my permission.
Right now there is a MASSIVE legal problem here which won't be addressed until the resolution gets good enough that a senator's daughter has some topless sunbathing pictures wind up on the web.

Let me be clear here. I don't necessarily think I should be getting paid, but I DO think that Google making money and dictating terms while posessing a virtual monopoly on this information (as far as the average person is concerned) is simply not fair to all the other residents of earth that they are selling pictures of. I would think that at a bare minimum I would at least have the right to use the pictures they take of my own property in whatever way I see fit.
After all, these aren't pictures of me willingly going out in public, they are pictures of private property.
Furthermore, arguments about the distance from which they are taken are quite silly, as I could easily bug your house via laser beam from hundreds of meters away.
Are you okay with that?
Should I be able to sell your private conversations simply because I've figured out a way to do so without ever actually physically tresspassing on your property? Should I be able to dictate the terms under which you can see which conversations of yours I'm actually selling?

Re:I don't get it either

[BobTheLawyer]

The law works in a slightly non-intuitive way here. As a legal matter there is generally no copyright in the appearance of your property; therefore taking a picture of it does not breach copyright law. There is, however, copyright in a picture of your property (no matter who takes it), and anyone copying this picture (even the original property owner) is potentially in breach of copyright.

It's not difficult to come up with specific counter-examples (e.g. if you have a work of art displayed in your garden) but this is the general case.

Re:I don't get it either

[IgnoramusMaximus]

The law works in a slightly non-intuitive way here.

This is a sure-fire way to tell that the law is fundamentally flawed and does not work. Copyright and patent laws were created by men with good intentions but were based on fatally flawed assumptions about the nature of information and are now "non-intuitively" requiring ever expanding, outlandish and convoluted legal scaffolding to prop the whole teetering tower of rank nonsense up.

Re:I don't get it either

[juhaz]

If you're going to take pictures of my property, without my permission and sell them for a profit, why aren't I getting paid?

Because, thank $DEITIES, things aren't yet as far into the realms of insanity that you, or anyone, owns any sort of right to how a piece of GODDAMN LAND looks like. It was there five billion years before you were born, and it'll be there five billion years after you're dead, you didn't create it. If the kind of insanity you're griping for would ever see the day of light, say good-bye not just to Google Earth, but also to all photography by non-corporations. Everything in this insane world is someones property, no individual would ever again be able to take a goddamn picture without permissions and money, yay! Progress!

Right now there is a MASSIVE legal problem here which won't be addressed until the resolution gets good enough that a senator's daughter has some topless sunbathing pictures wind up on the web.

There's no problem, and hopefully the non-problem will NEVER, EVER, get "addressed".

I would think that at a bare minimum I would at least have the right to use the pictures they take of my own property in whatever way I see fit.

A monopoly? Give me a break, you can't turn around without hitting an aerial photo these days. Google may have the largest coverage and more hi-res areas than most, but they're hardly a monopoly even from average persons perspective. And they don't take the pictures, and they don't get to decide what to do with them. They couldn't give them to you if they wanted to. Go ahead and take your whine to the companies that do hold the copyright.

After all, these aren't pictures of me willingly going out in public

That's right. These aren't pictures of you at all. If they were, I'd see the problem. I doubt there ever will be either, even if it'll become technologically possible.

Should I be able to sell your private conversations simply because I've figured out a way to do so without ever actually physically tresspassing on your property?

No. Because they're private conversations. Nor should Google, or anyone, be able to sell pictures or videos of me, or you, or senator's daughter. But should you wish to point your listening rig to a tree on my private property, and sell a tape of birdsong, or crickets chirping, knock yourself out.

Re:I don't get it either

[theLOUDroom]

The law works in a slightly non-intuitive way here. As a legal matter there is generally no copyright in the appearance of your property; therefore taking a picture of it does not breach copyright law.

I understand that's the way the law works, but common sense works differently. As I said, the law will not catch up until we see some politician's daughter's titties wind up on the web.

A more sensible approach to this matter would allow for some level of privacy and would treat these images the way the law treats entries in the phone book.

Do very little evil?

[syousef]

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.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Threni]

Is it anything to do with Google? If Google have licensed data from a third party, then they'll be subject to the terms of that contract, which presumably forbids allowing others to access it without some restrictions. Otherwise the licencing company is giving that data out for free to companies with whom they could have instead sold it to.

Re:Do very little evil?

[stunt_penguin]

I don't know how the hell issuing a cease and desist so as to hold onto your digitalglobe reseller account could be construed as evil.

If Digitalglobe (who are the providers of Google's content on google earth) decided Google were breaching their TOS and decided they'd be better off keeping their imaging to themselves then everyone loses, including anyone using local.google.com and Google Earth.

Seems to me that Google are trying to keep a good thing going, and being IMHO reasonably respectful towards the Gaia project's authors.

Re:Do very little evil?

[dgg3565]

To be blunt, that is a perfectly stupid statement. As has been pointed out below in other comments and in the stub--"Amongst other things, they cited 'improper usage of licensed data,' which Google licenses from assorted third party vendors."--Google is simply being faithful to prior contractual agreements. Heck, they were gentle enough to simply request a cease and desist instead of sicking the lawyers on them. And is a company protects its interests really "doing evil"? The fact that a company might want to have a say in a product or IP they OWN and they took the time and money to create seems reasonable. Granted, organizations like the RIAA and MPAA go overboard and abuse the law, but that doesn't alter the right of companies to reasonably enforce their ownership. If you don't like it, don't buy it.

Re:Do very little evil?

[mr_matticus]

It's not 'doing evil' if you're complying with terms you voluntarily agreed to, and it's not 'doing evil' when you're forced by the law to comply with something. They can't just do what they want, precisely because, as you mention, they ARE a publicly-traded corporation. They could always ignore the law and contracts and be admired by a few Slashdotters a few years later when there are "anyone remember Google?" posts in every story.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Perseid]

Really? Let's try.

companyCanDoNoEvil("Sony");

COMPILER ERROR

Hmm. Ok. How about this?

companyCanDoNoEvil("SCO");

MASSIVE ERROR. MELTED PROCESSOR DETECTED.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Simon Garlick]

More to the point, is it anything to do with "Your Rights Online"? WTF?

Re:Do very little evil?

[zcat_NZ]

It' not black and white, there's a spectrum...

Always evil - Microsoft, SCO
Mostly evil - Novell, most MAFIAA member companies (which includes Sony Music)

    (most other companies fit in here somewhere)

Mostly good - Google, IBM,
Always good - Canonical

Re:Do very little evil?

[aussie_a]

They shouldn't accept licenses that forces them to do evil. Kinda like not operating in countries where the laws force them to do evil.

Re:Do very little evil?

[pestilence669]

This isn't evil, it's a requirement of Google's data suppliers. They signed contracts with providers to give map & satellite data of the globe away for free. How satellite imaging providers agreed to this is beyond me. Getting photos like Google Earth uses can be quite expensive (the whole launching satellites thing). In any case, Google pulled it off. They're probably paying some good penny to do it too.

I don't get the objection here. Google gives this stuff away including an API. Open API's were unheard of until Google came around. Somehow, the providers agreed to that as well. That's not enough? They should also become a conduit for everyone that wants to use Google's licensed data as they please?

This is why I don't write open source software anymore. The expectations of the community often far outweighs what they're entitled to.

Re:Do very little evil?

[IHaveNothingToSay]

Mod the parent flamebait if you want. But it's not. It's a fully valid viewpoint, you cinical people.

Just because the note's written in fluffy-wuffy, asky-nicey engineerspeak, doesn't mean there isn't a massive gorilla backing it up....

Re:Do very little evil?

[Lemmy Caution]

So tech-industry centric. The software industry in-toto is about as evil as a a troop of girl scouts.

Microsoft on its most-evil day is a thousand times less evil than Monsanto on its better days. And Oracle ain't exactly all puppy farts and unicorn giggles, either.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Jugalator]

If it suits them they will restrict usage, pull products etc. as it suits them. PR is just that. PR.

Well, but is it even "evil"?

Obviously, they can't let users spread data Google have licensed under special agreements beyond their control. That would put Google in quite some trouble. There are after all organizations owning the maps you're browsing. If they open sourced all their material, Google would perhaps not have as big trouble allowing this. The Google Maps API is a way for them to let their users re-use their service in custom applications while keeping things under their control, something the organizations owning the material have most likely demanded they need to do.

Re:Do very little evil?

[sumdumass]

You know, Whats yours is mine and whats mine is mine. If you stop me from using whats mine-your evil.

Sounds silly but I'm getting this general drift from a lot of replies that I have read. I'm wondering what,-if anything would be different if google owned the content as well as everything onvolved with providing it so no third party had a say in it. If the above was true, Would this automaticly make google EVIL now? And would that be because they didn't give something away or because the way they didn't give something to a particular group of people?

Re:Do very little evil?

[Threni]

> They shouldn't accept licenses that forces them to do evil.

It's not forcing anyone to do evil.

Re:Do very little evil?

[syousef]

To be blunt, that is a perfectly stupid statement.

To be blunt you have wonderful people skills, and know how to get your point across well without putting someone off side.

Google is simply being faithful to prior contractual agreements.

Well it's not clear to me that GAIA clearly violated Google's terms. If they weren't Google's terms, a cease and desist (which by the way is usually drafted by company lawyers) isn't so benign. All that work GAIA did goes down the tube because they didn't look into terms and conditions they may not have been privy with. Now you if you point to Google's terms and find something GAIA was violating, that's different as the onus is then on GAIA's team to check those before using the data.

The fact that a company might want to have a say in a product or IP they OWN and they took the time and money to create seems reasonable

I've long argued that this is entirely unreasonable and what's most broken about the legal system when it comes to IP law. It's not how the world works today but I believe that there should be control over the profits/fruits of the IP created but not of the IP itself. The entire IP system is meant to guarantee innovation isn't stiffled. Instead companies focus on guaranteeing their profits even if that means killing off innovation.

Re:Do very little evil?

[sumdumass]

Whats evil about this? Would it be Google Asking some one not to risk losing the ability for google to obtain and distribute the materials in question or would it be the people who, without asking decided to take the materials in question from google with asking permision and attempt to use it on their own behalf outside of google's frame of reference?

If evil is even mentioned, I think we need to examine the enitre story a little bit more before throwing names around.

Re:Do very little evil?

[syousef]

How is killing off someone's pet project that they've put a lot of effort into not evil???

Re:Do very little evil?

[eric.t.f.bat]

In what way is it evil to keep your promise? They signed a contract; they're doing what they said they'd do.

Google is being good, not evil, by doing this. Unless you think they were evil to sign the contract, in which case they're being evil if they provide Google Earth at all.

The mistaken assumption is "anyone who takes away my toys must be evil". If you have that assumption, you're not being good, you're just being childish.

Re:Do very little evil?

[TubeSteak]

Heck, they were gentle enough to simply request a cease and desist instead of sicking the lawyers on them.

Bzzzt. Wrong

A C&D letter is written by t3h lawyerz. It is step one in the process of suing someone, since Judges like to see that you asked 'em to stop before suing.

I guess what you meant was that Google had its lawyers write a gently worded C&D.

Re:Do very little evil?

[chris234]

Maybe when the pet project doesn't have the rights to do what it's doing?

Re:Do very little evil?

[bodan]

Just because a massive gorilla sending you a letter doesn't mean there's evil intent behind it. That's just saying anything more powerful than you is evil, automatically, just because they can.

I'd say that's a lot more cynical than believing that if someone who can force you to do something (that's damaging to them) just asks you nicely, it might not be just for PR.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Cheapy]

Substitute the word Google in this story with Microsoft, send it to the /. editors, and then see just how evil this really is.

It'd be quite funny to see too.

Re:Do very little evil?

[stunt_penguin]

Whenever the spinoff threatens the very existence of your own. It's that serious.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Sancho]

I've long argued that this is entirely unreasonable and what's most broken about the legal system when it comes to IP law. It's not how the world works today but I believe that there should be control over the profits/fruits of the IP created but not of the IP itself. The entire IP system is meant to guarantee innovation isn't stiffled. Instead companies focus on guaranteeing their profits even if that means killing off innovation.

It's hard to say. Certainly there would be more innovation if anyone was allowed to use the data of these images willy-nilly, but would the images themselves ever have existed?

Say I want to map out my hometown using aerial geography. That's a fairly large undertaking, requiring a plane, probably multiple camera, and almost certainly multiple passes over the area. If I'm expected pay for the costs of acquiring those photos, but I can't expect to even break even (because someone can take my data and release it for free), then I have less incentive to spend the money required to acquire the data. We don't get innovation on the use of this data until such time as the data is acquired, and that can be a costly venture.

In the case of books, it's even darker. The only material value a fiction book has is in the paper it's printed on (or the cost of bandwidth, if I release it online). Other than that, any initial investment comes strictly at an opportunity cost (my time). The entire value of the book is wrapped up in its IP, because copies have a trivial cost (compare to 200 years ago, when printing books had a significant cost). To me, this means that intellectual property laws are even more important today, though they should be significantly reduced in temporal length. The ease of duplication means that there is virtually no replication cost, and very little distribution costs (given electronic sales). Any sale can be virtually pure profit, meaning the time to make up the opportunity cost of creating the work is reduced.

For movies and music which typically have an up front, material cost, things change a bit, but still largely hold true. I'd guess (pulling the number out of my--well, you know) that 90% of the money that a film will earn is generated within the first 10 years, certainly within the first 20. Before duplication and distribution were so easy, a lot of the earnings would be eaten up in materials. Without those costs, again, it's much easier to make up the initial investment and turn a nice profit in a shorter period of time.

I'd be really ecstatic if there were stricter controls even than we have now--as long as the length of copyright was reduced drastically and keys were escrowed with the government and released at the end of the copyright term.

Re:Do very little evil?

[wwwillem]

Substitute the word Google in this story with Microsoft, ...

The funny thing is that the license for live.local (aka Virtual Earth) from Microsoft is much more liberal than Google's maps. IANAL, but I understand that MS' maps and sat-image material can even be used for commercial applications.

What is of course interesting, is that also Microsoft doesn't have satellites flying around the globe and is probably dependent on the same content providers as Google. Maybe MS has better negotiation skills, when it comes to buying IP... :-)

Re:Do very little evil?

[Hal_Porter]

And Oracle ain't exactly all puppy farts and unicorn giggles, either.

Yes it was. Mind you, if you knew why the puppy was farting and the unicorn giggling, it wouldn't seem so innocent.

UHIA?

Re:Do very little evil?

[zotz]

"The entire value of the book is wrapped up in its IP, because copies have a trivial cost (compare to 200 years ago, when printing books had a significant cost)."

Well, I am putting my time where my mouth is and experimenting with other possibilities:

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/85937
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/262954
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/187924

"I'd be really ecstatic if there were stricter controls even than we have now--as long as the length of copyright was reduced drastically and keys were escrowed with the government and released at the end of the copyright term."

Well, I would say that you are not thinking straight or that the punishments in your country are no where near as bad as they are in mine. How does 4 or 5 years in a reputedly very nasty jail for each non-genuine CD or DVD in your posession sound? (By that I mean even ones that you may have purchesed in good faith and been ripped off in the purchase because you were sold a bogus disk.)

I am fine with the drastically reduced terms though.

Would you care to comment on the first comment at this link:

http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=4 3#comment

I am also experimenting with music:

http://musicians.opensrc.org/DrewRoberts

and am thinking about messing somehow with a movie next year...

all the best,

drew

Re:Do very little evil?

[Sancho]

"I'd be really ecstatic if there were stricter controls even than we have now--as long as the length of copyright was reduced drastically and keys were escrowed with the government and released at the end of the copyright term."

Well, I would say that you are not thinking straight or that the punishments in your country are no where near as bad as they are in mine. How does 4 or 5 years in a reputedly very nasty jail for each non-genuine CD or DVD in your posession sound? (By that I mean even ones that you may have purchesed in good faith and been ripped off in the purchase because you were sold a bogus disk.)

Well, I said stricter controls, not stricter punishments, but yes, here in America, pretty much only big-time, commercial violators are imprisoned. Otherwise, it's all handled in civil courts.

Re:Do very little evil?

[zotz]

"Otherwise, it's all handled in civil courts."

To be honest, I am not sure that doing things in the civil courts with the hugh statutory damages is mugh better.

At least in criminal court there would be a higher burden of proof.

The hugh potential "monetary punishments" are fairly horrendous as well. Down here, I think the monetary side is something like 20,000 or 25,000 per disk as well as the jail time mentioned...

"Well, I said stricter controls..."

I noticed that, what sort of stricter controls do you envision with lesser punishments? (Or equal punishments?)

all the best,

drew
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/111123

Re:Do very little evil?

[unitron]

"More to the point, is it anything to do with "Your Rights Online"?"

Okay, so maybe it's more like "Particular Rights You Don't Have Online" :-)

Re:Do very little evil?

[Sancho]

Forgot to add my comments on that link:

I think those are great ideas, except number 5. I really don't see a good reason to limit the price that the work can be sold for, particularly a copylefted work (where the market truly will decide whether that price is reasonable). I'm also not wild about copylefted works being copyleft for the life of the author (honestly, that could just make someone a target for assassination--I know it sounds crazy, but it's true.)

Re:Do very little evil?

[Sancho]

Largely, legal reductions in fair use. Right now, a large part of the 'test' for fair use is whether or not the copying is commercial in nature. Most personal copying (i.e. making a copy of a CD to keep at work while keeping the original at home) is thought to be fair use, though I'm not sure that it's ever been tested in court. Of course, these restrictions are largely ceremonial, as these types of controls are not currently enforceable. But I'd give up my [assumed] right to copy my CDs if, 10 years later, the CD fell into the public domain and I could copy it with wild abandon.

Mind you, I'm coming from a US-centric perspective, so in other countries, it may be that restrictions should be lessened to be what I would consider 'reasonable'.

Re:Do very little evil?

[fatphil]

"Open API's were unheard of until Google came around."

That has got to be one of the most incorrect statements ever stated with a straight face.

Open APIs predate the web. Open web APIs predate google's existance.

Re:Do very little evil?

[pestilence669]

Yes yes, you're correct. Open API's sure do predate the web. What I was referring to was a dot-com openly distributing its own APIs... for something *useful*. Beenz had its own API, after all, but it wasn't exactly for the "greater good."

Re:Do very little evil?

[syousef]

Wow /. moderation is broken. When half the people like what you say (mod insightful), and the other don't like what you say and mod troll and flamebait you end up with a message that apparently has no more worth than an offhand comment that isn't controvertial.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Znork]

"Say I want to map out my hometown using aerial geography."

Not a very good example, considering there is ample incentive for governments to do it, and that they have been doing it since planes and cameras were invented.

But even if we ignore that, you can be sure that _someone_ will take the pictures (landowners, tourism industry, scouts, heck, I'd pay to map my hometown if it were a gray blob on a global map), and that as long as the information is shared, it becomes only a problem of aggregation (something that opensource has proven is most eminently possible).

"To me, this means that intellectual property laws are even more important today"

Why? The monopoly right gives you no guarantee of money back for your invested time, it merely guarantees that circulation will be below the economic optimum and that efforts and resources will be spent promoting specific works in competition with yours, thus reducing the amount of capital going to the original producers.

If you want a system that actually promotes creators and creativity, IP isnt it. IP was originally intended to protect merchants from competition in exchange for services to the crown; the rest was just propaganda.

To have any chance at coming up with a useful system you need to go to the bottom and reconstruct the system from the actual intent instead. If that intent is to maximize the rate of information production and progress, the system would be vastly different from the current one.

Some of the best suggestions I've seen are directed levies/benefits; for example for books, free up reproduction so anyone could reproduce them (with the caveat that they have to register the number of copies of the work they reproduce). Put a direct tax of, say, 50% of sales price on any sales (and/or advertizing derived revenue) of such works. Pay the derived revenues to the authors (possibly with a max payout per work over a period, to allow maximizing the number of authors able to make a living off writing, while encouraging continued writing). With competition restored in the reproduction and distribution sectors we'd get cheaper books, _and_ more money to the authors, _and_ more innovative forms (on-demand printing of _any_ book you want, any desireable format, etc).

Similar systems would work for larger productions like films; you could have a limit of 2-3 times invested production capital instead.

Same would work for patents; you could even imagine things like applying the taxation base to undesireable products like older cars or older medicines, in favour of new and better technology, thus _increasing_ technological adoption rate rather than slowing it down.

Re:Do very little evil?

[zotz]

The reason for number 5 is so that they choose an honest value for the work for tax purposes re point 4. It eliminates all the trouble of having a govenrment bureaucrat assess the value and all that goes along with it.

In essence, you tell us what it is worth, we will tax you based on the value you give us. Be honest with us though because we will force you to sell the copyright at the value you give us. (a few tweaks might help.)

"I'm also not wild about copylefted works being copyleft for the life of the author (honestly, that could just make someone a target for assassination--I know it sounds crazy, but it's true.)"

I don't doubt it, but that is true for copyright works now, which means all of your works probably. I have never heard of anyone being killed for it though. Anyone? Still... OK, copyleft is for 5,000 years. Seems like the supremes in the US would be ok with the idea that 5,000 yeas is a limited time as per the US constitution. (IE, now it is life + x years.)

"I really don't see a good reason to limit the price that the work can be sold for, particularly a copylefted work"

I guess something is not clear. In 4, copyleft works are not taxed, only copyright works, and so 5the forced sales of 5 do not apply as they are only there to promote honesty in step 4.

all the best,

drew
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/262954
CC BY-SA (trying to copyleft my 'novels')
Enjoy...

Re:Do very little evil?

[zotz]

"Largely, legal reductions in fair use."

Gotcha, and I might make that bargain as well, but the problem I see is at least twofold.

1. They can make it and then pull the same foolishness with retroactive extensions that they do now.

2. They can't even get the public to comply now with these lesser 'controls' and the current extreme punishments. How are they ever gonna get the public to go along with extra 'controls' while lessening the punishments. (They really do need to lessen the punishments.)

all the best,

drew
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/262954
Sayings - Deterred Bahamian Novel
NaNoWriMo 2006 winning novel (in progress)

Re:Do very little evil?

[lptport1]

I don't know how many people actually read the letter, but it was respectful and polite. I have no doubt that there are legal teeth behind it, but it appealed to the developer(s?) of gaia as individuals. It was not sent by a lawyer, and it was not meant to be threatening or oppressive. Were I talented and creative enough to be in their shoes, I would also kill the project given a request like this.

Seriously. Some companies deserve respect for how they handle things. Google wins points in my eyes, not because they're restricting how we access Google Earth, but because they did so without sending in the lawyers.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Haeleth]

How is killing off someone's pet project that they've put a lot of effort into not evil???

By that measure, Superman is the most evil fictional character ever. He's always killing off people's pet projects that they've put a lot of effort into.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Dreben]

RIAA and MPAA don't have proprietary API offerings to access their (owned, leased or otherwise) data. Google does. An oss API is competing for users of the proprietary Google API.

On the other hand, not having seen the Google API EULA, I'm guessing it explicitly defines what is fair re-use of the 3rd party vendor's data. Couldn't an oss API have the same type of vernacular in its EULA? I suppose this might be contstrued as extending the GPL (or whatever license Gaia was using), but this component/extension would be explicitly limited to the reuse of the data (not the API), indemnifying Gaia from improper use of 3rd party data from anyone that were to use the Gaia API. I'm fairly confident this is similar to what Google says in their EULA.

It would be interesting to read the Google Earth API EULA.

Re:Do very little evil?

[anthony_dipierro]

If Digitalglobe (who are the providers of Google's content on google earth) decided Google were breaching their TOS and decided they'd be better off keeping their imaging to themselves then everyone loses, including anyone using local.google.com and Google Earth.

Maybe. But then again, maybe not. If Digitalglobe stops licensing proprietary imagery to Google, then Google will have to get free content from somewhere. This would likely cause a huge increase in the amount of free orthoimagery out there, which means everyone wins, except Digitalglobe that is.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Sancho]

But even if we ignore that, you can be sure that _someone_ will take the pictures (landowners, tourism industry, scouts, heck, I'd pay to map my hometown if it were a gray blob on a global map), and that as long as the information is shared, it becomes only a problem of aggregation (something that opensource has proven is most eminently possible).

If the cost is high enough, you can't be assured of this. That's the point. So pretend it costs more, and boom--valuable data that will never be acquired by anyone because of the cost involved.

Some of the best suggestions I've seen are directed levies/benefits; for example for books, free up reproduction so anyone could reproduce them (with the caveat that they have to register the number of copies of the work they reproduce). Put a direct tax of, say, 50% of sales price on any sales (and/or advertizing derived revenue) of such works. Pay the derived revenues to the authors (possibly with a max payout per work over a period, to allow maximizing the number of authors able to make a living off writing, while encouraging continued writing). With competition restored in the reproduction and distribution sectors we'd get cheaper books, _and_ more money to the authors, _and_ more innovative forms (on-demand printing of _any_ book you want, any desireable format, etc).

This certainly changes the distribution model, effectively eliminating the middleman (the people the MPAA, BSA, and RIAA represent). But this only deals with issues where the information is sold. What about the current majority of current copyright infringements where the information is freely given away?

The monopoly right gives you no guarantee of money back for your invested time

Of course not. Nothing short of government-funded innovation will ever guarantee money back for your invested time. But at least if your product is worth a damn, you can rest assured that if you didn't make any money off of it, it was probably your failure to promote the product.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Sancho]

Thanks for clearing all of that up. Sounds like a great system now, but sadly, probably something we will never see in practice.

As to the assassination bit, yes, right now a copyright term (in the US) is dependant upon the lift of the author, but the copyright remains with his estate for something ridiculous like 40 years (or is it longer?) after his death. This makes it far less useful to assassinate a person just to get his works dumped into the public domain.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Sancho]

Fair points, but short of technological innovations, they will never get the public to comply on these points. I guess there's just no real compromise for the content producers (since shortening copyright terms just means reducing their power without really getting anything in return.

And any new system is subject to retroactive foolishness. Even copylefted works could be retroactively made copyrighted if someone paid the government enough money.

Re:Do very little evil?

[anthony_dipierro]

It's hard to say. Certainly there would be more innovation if anyone was allowed to use the data of these images willy-nilly, but would the images themselves ever have existed?

Some of them would. Some of them probably wouldn't.

Say I want to map out my hometown using aerial geography. That's a fairly large undertaking, requiring a plane, probably multiple camera, and almost certainly multiple passes over the area. If I'm expected pay for the costs of acquiring those photos, but I can't expect to even break even (because someone can take my data and release it for free), then I have less incentive to spend the money required to acquire the data. We don't get innovation on the use of this data until such time as the data is acquired, and that can be a costly venture.

So get together with your neighbors and form a homeowners association, if you don't already have one. Then figure out the costs to map your hometown and propose it at your next association meeting. If your neighbors agree with you that the benefits are worth the costs, then you'll get the data. If not, then you won't.

In the case of books, it's even darker. The only material value a fiction book has is in the paper it's printed on (or the cost of bandwidth, if I release it online).

Fiction books would probably suffer more than any other type of work from a lack of copyright protection (mega-pop singer/songwriters would be a close second). Fiction authors who weren't independently wealthy would probably have to rely on non-profit organizations to pay them for their work, or else get a day-job and write only in their spare time for the fun of it. Personally I don't think this would be such a bad thing, but I'm not a big fan of fiction books (or mega-pop singers for that matter, I'd just as well listen to a hometown singer/songwriter whose self-produced CDs you pay for out of courtesy rather than because of copyright law).

For movies and music which typically have an up front, material cost, things change a bit, but still largely hold true.

Watermarking and contractual agreements with movie theaters should be enough to pay for the low to medium budget films. The high budget blockbusters might be a thing of the past, though, especially if trademark/merchandising laws went out along with the copyright laws.

I haven't mentioned the benefits, because I think we both know what they are. And in the end, I think the benefits would outweigh these negatives. At the least I'd like to see copyright law go away for software and non-fiction (which would include GIS data/imagery). For more creative rather than productive works I'm more open to merely modifying copyright law.

Re:Do very little evil?

[zotz]

"And any new system is subject to retroactive foolishness. Even copylefted works could be retroactively made copyrighted if someone paid the government enough money."

Or public domain and then the derivatives copyrighted...

all the best,

drew

Re:Do very little evil?

[zotz]

"This makes it far less useful to assassinate a person just to get his works dumped into the public domain."

Sure, so like I say, just change to life plus X in the proposed system instead of simply life.

"Sounds like a great system now, but sadly, probably something we will never see in practice."

You are probably right, but, if you like them, spread the ideas, you never know what might start a change...

all the best,

drew

Re:Do very little evil?

[SydShamino]

Say I want to map out my hometown using aerial geography. That's a fairly large undertaking, requiring a plane, probably multiple camera, and almost certainly multiple passes over the area. If I'm expected pay for the costs of acquiring those photos, but I can't expect to even break even (because someone can take my data and release it for free), then I have less incentive to spend the money required to acquire the data. We don't get innovation on the use of this data until such time as the data is acquired, and that can be a costly venture.

Well, you could use contract law and prevent anyone who receives your images from distributing them in any way. I have some pictures, taken in 1917, that I used in a research project in college. They are not copyrighted in the US or anywhere else, but I signed a contract when I bought them that defined my rights to redistribute them (the originals, or copies of those originals), and the penalties for doing so improperly. These limitations actually prevented me from publishing my project online as I originally intended - I had to turn it in on CD instead - but they were important enough to use anyway.

Without copyright, there are still ways to protect investment in so-called "intellectual property".

Re:Do very little evil?

[Sancho]

But this can stifle innovation even more! With contracts preventing the images from being displayed to any public which could copy them, we wouldn't have Google Maps at all.

Re:Do very little evil?

[Goaway]

So basically, they should not offer Google Earth and Google Maps at all?

Re:Do very little evil?

[syousef]

I see so you're comparing running an IT project that gives people a different view of Google's data to say blowing the west coast of the US off the map and killing millions. Yes I think that's a perfectly sane sounding argument and I wish to subscribe to your worldview. By the way, I hope you do realise that Superman is a fictional character, right?

Re:Do very little evil?

[Dr.Syshalt]

Sure thing, everyone knows it - abiding the terms of contract doesn't make you evil, it makes you LAWFUL.

Licensing!

[screevo]

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.

Re:Licensing!

[screevo]

This isn't some silly intellectual property quibble such as Microsoft is pulling with the Linux Community. Google was given access to this third party data to use in a SPECIFIC manner. The Gaia project uses the data in a way that is incompatible with the license. If Google allowed this, they risk having their license to the data pulled, and thus, Google Maps and Google Earth go bye bye. As a proponent of the open source movement, one of the first things we have to do is respect license agreements. If you don't agree with the license, don't use it. You'd get mad if you GPL'ed a project, someone took the code, and used it in a manner that didn't match the license. Don't be hypocritical when a company protects themselves.

Re:Licensing!

[Jugalator]

I don't get the point with all of you protecting Google's actions...

Well, maybe you need to read up on the effects from licensing third party data then.

If you'd work for a company under special agreements to use third party databases, you'd have a much easier time understanding Google's actions.

Re:Licensing!

[SnowZero]

Care to back that up with a legitimate example? I don't recall many people bashing MS for revoking the pirated Vista activation code.

Re:Licensing!

[Omnifarious]

*nod* I was initially thinking that if gaim wasn't in the wrong for using the Oscar protocol to talk to AIM servers, then the Gaia people couldn't be in the wrong either. I still don't think they're exactly in the wrong. But I do feel that the proper thing for them to do is agree to Google's terms precisely because the data Google is serving up is not licensed for the use Gaia is putting it to. Essentially they are being nice and helping Google honor agreements it has made with third parties.

OTOH, I don't know if I would've been happy with Google if they'd sued the Gaia people. I'm not sure though. I think the situation is kind of murky.

How about Google News?

[Onno Hovers]

Google News is using stories from online sources without a license. When will Google itself cease and desist?

Re:How about Google News?

[TheSunborn]

As soon as someone ask the to do so. (Just search slashdot for a history of someone doing exactly that, resulting in google dropping them as requested.)

Re:How about Google News?

[mr_matticus]

Google is also using content from websites without a license! When will they stop searching other sites?! Why can't Google create its own content?!

Like someone else mentioned, delisting is an option for anyone who wants it.

Re:How about Google News?

[mr_matticus]

No. Spam is being bombarded with unsolicited messages which you didn't want in the first place. What Google and Google News and Froogle, et al. do doesn't affect the owner at all, except generating more traffic to their site. People go to the site intentionally, and they click links intentionally, and doing so takes them to your site, so you still collect all the ad revenue and you still control the content.

If Google were contacting or somehow interfering with site owners, your analogy would make sense.

Re:How about Google News?

[Restil]

In addition, you can prevent google and other search engines from ever crawling your site in the first place if you just use the robots.txt file.

-Restil

Re:How about Google News?

[Myopic]

Google ceases and desists whenever someone asks them to.

wow, tough request

[bunions]

> request to cease and desist from all past, present and future development

Hopefully google will let the developers use the google time machine to go back and not work on it.

Re:wow, tough request

[tony1343]

I was just about to make the same comment. Good request Google lawyers; nice job choosing your words carefully. Normally, I wouldn't care, but considering that in legal documents the phrasing can mean everything, I would expect more from my lawyer. Hopefully, this guy isn't writing their contracts.

Re:wow, tough request

[tony1343]

Well, I guess I can't read. It says Michael Jones, the Chief Technologist, sent the request. Usually, a cease and desist letter would be sent from a lawyer though.

Re:wow, tough request

[Sloppy]

Hopefully, this guy isn't writing their contracts.

But the guy sure seems to have a talent for covering all the angles.

Qua?

[Graymalkin]

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.

Re:Qua?

[cycoj]

Well I disagree. Google is putting the data freely available on the net. They should not be able to prevent users from using that content. What if microsoft suddenly decides to have all it's servers only provide content to IE, and then threaten firefox developers because they develop a program which is able to access their content. On a different note google is reusing quite a significant amount of publically available image data as well AFAIK. If you read the notice on the Gaia site it is also not quite clear what Google mainly objects to. They talk about reverse engineering and improper use of license.

Re:Qua?

[mr_matticus]

No, they're not putting it freely on the net. They're giving you access to that data (which they paid for), which in no small part belongs to someone else. That's like saying that the articles on JSTOR are a free-for-all because JSTOR gives you a web interface to them. Google has provided access for free, and you want to trample on their good will and take it for your own use.

It's not Google's data, and it's not free as in speech. If Google had their own satellites and put their own images on Google Earth, then you'd have a point. But as long as a significant portion of that data belongs to someone else, and as long as their agreement is that Google may use the data, Google has no right and cannot be expected to allow that data to be accessed freely.

Re:Qua?

[xigxag]

Well I disagree. Google is putting the data freely available on the net.

Google is not making the data freely available -- it is encrypted and can (ordinarily) only be accessed from within Google software or within the Google network through a passkey. It is as if you had some private banking information stored on an ftp server. The server is connected to the internet. Does that mean it's up for grabs? Would you like for someone to crack your password? Would you like for them to share that information with others?

Secondly, there is no indication in the letter that Google is preventing users from using the content. They are merely trying to regulate it, just as you must regulate any resource. There is not even the threat of a lawsuit. More likely Google would just change their protocols and make people jump through more hoops to get at the data. Is that to anyone's advantage?

Imagine you own a toy store. You have a large free candy dispenser outside your store window set up so that people can sample sweets throughout the day, in the hope of luring in customers. After a few weeks, a woman named Gaia comes by and figures out how to jerry-rig the dispenser so that she can get an unlimited quantity of candy for free all at once. She sets up a table in the public park with the candy she's taken from your dispenser and just gives it out to people, no charge. That's nice of her, being so generous, but it's really at your expense. Soon after, you're forced to take down your dispenser.

That's what's wrong with your argument.

Re:Qua?

[martin-boundary]

That's a pretty interesting argument, there. If you take it to its logical conclusion, you'd have to say that Google (and Yahoo, MSN etc) are operating search engines illegally, since they are clearly making unlicensed use of nearly all the crawled pages they have in their search engine index. It's a fair position to take, but where do you go from there?

Re:Qua?

[cycoj]

Google is not making the data freely available -- it is encryptedThat is simply wrong, if that was the case gaia would not be working. The gaia guys simply reverse engineered the google earth protocol, so that they could get the content. Perfectly legitimate and legal(at least in Russia, most of Europe) IMO. Now if google does not want people to access that data they should encrypt it.

Re:Qua?

[mr_matticus]

Well, there's a distinction between JSTOR and Google in that JSTOR is the uploader and maintainer of the electronic copies, whereas Google simply takes you to external content and doesn't assume maintenance, storage, or distribution control over any of that content (Google cache of course being potentially problematic). Google is more like a telephone book that automatically finds your business ad and puts it in the book for you--yes, it's done without your explicit permission, but it also only helps you make money from your site. Google doesn't infringe upon privacy because the information it indexes is publicly accessible on the Internet--it doesn't give access to protected content or private sites.

Now, Google cache, you might say, is unlawfully copying sites to its own servers, but it doesn't assume authorship or ownership over those copies and does cite the original. Moreover, not all sites are cached. I'm not familiar enough with the operation to know whether it's opt-in or opt-out mirroring, but generally what they do is considered convenient and harmless. Those who have a different belief certainly may prevent caching and may ask Google to remove any cached files they may have. As far as I know, Google complies without question to these requests.

Re:Qua?

[ben there...]

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 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.

Re:Qua?

[mr_matticus]

You continually ignore the detail that the data the Gaia project is accessing isn't free as in speech. It's free as in beer, because Google bought the beer and is sharing it with anyone who comes to Google's house on Saturdays. It's licensed, proprietary data, and the Gaia people did not have a license to it. That's not "perfectly legitimate and legal" anywhere. You can't just take Google's beer from his garage and give it out yourself, even though Google isn't charging for it.

Re:Qua?

[martin-boundary]

Not just google cache. The google search engine index itself is just as problematic. Basically, Google is a single legal entity dealing with millions of people simultaneously, and in doing so it is making substantial cumulative use in unlicensed ways of the content placed on the web.

Take for example the preview you get when you make a search. You get maybe 3 sentence snippets, but those snippets vary depending on the keyword. Fair use? Think again. Since google serves millions of people who search a substantial number of keywords, the google legal entity is repackaging a substantial cumulative portion of all the popular websites to the public, certainly contradicting fair use.

The only thing protecting them really (in the US) is the DMCA, which acknowledges that massive copyright infringement is taking place but nevertheless grants immunity to common carriers.

I'm not sure the opt-in/opt-out argument you propose changes any of this. It's trivial for any software project to introduce an opt-in/opt-out system if that were an effective legal protection. For example, the project in TFA only has to introduce an opt-out mechanism that allows any original map-maker to contact any user of the Gaia software with an explicit set of coordinates for each individual map that they want that user to not be able to access. Then all a map copyright holder would have to do is track down and contact each such user separately with a few thousand coordinates for each separate map they want unavailable. That's a small software tweak with a big payoff, if in fact opt-out is a protection.

Re:Qua?

[temcat]

I don't get it - what exactly is being infringed on here? Can an API ever be copyrighted?

Re:Qua?

[Cow Herd (Anonymous)]

You missed some parts of the truth...

When you spend the money to photograph and map the surface of the Earth, current copyright law says that you can license it and do with it what you please

There's nothing fundamental about the ability of the generator of the data to license it. It's only a human law, not a natural law, and one that can be changed.

Re:Qua?

[pla]

When you spend the money to photograph and map the surface of the Earth

One problem there - In this case, you have used the correct pronoun in the above quote... "you".

I paid to have the surface of the Earth mapped. You probably did as well. Any taxpaying American has, and I expect this also applies to many non-Americans.

The vast majority of Google's data comes from the USGS, which our tax dollars funded. Most of the closer-in data comes from city or county funded (again, with out tax dollars) aerial surveys. Why the fuck shouldn't all that data fall under the public domain, totally FREE to everyone, since we paid for it in the first place?



This has nothing to do with fair use, and everything to do with the government giving us what we paid for. Google has certainly made it easier to get to that data, but it still counts as our data in the first place!

Re:Qua?

[Dreben]

Watermarking is a process that happens when imagery is pulled from the image server, likely JPEG 2000, and occurs regardless whether the imagery was requested with the Google Earth application, the Google Earth API, or any other API that knows how to request imagery from the image server. The imaging server application is likely either written using ER Mapper's ECW JPEG 2000 SDK (a GPL-like open source license for images under 500mb - i.e., Google Earth images) or LizardTech's MrSID proprietary server. I'm guessing unless Google wrote their own imaging server, they chose ER Mapper's (I would), it's more flexible and written to JPEG 2000 standards.

Re:Qua?

[damium]

You are over complicating the opt-out procedure. A usual opt-out request is done once and stored or attached to the data. You don't have to tell everyone who searches the web that you opt-out, you don't even have to tell every search engine, just opt-out in a robots.txt file or in meta headers.

Re:Qua?

[mr_matticus]

Fair use doesn't work that way. I could write a series of essays, each one quoting small sections of another work, and the combined sum of essays might quote 80% of that other work. It's still fair use.

The search engine provides you with relevant excerpts only. Each search is an independent application of the system and no one search will give you a meaningful percentage of the content of a single page. Google is not a single entity cumulatively providing entire texts--there is no way to get Google to provide an entire page to you through their normal search engine in a single use.

Re:Qua?

[martin-boundary]

You don't seem to understand fair use, or the concept of a single legal entity, then. Fair use applies to any legal entity, whether a human or a company. There are no special rules that apply only to humans.

As a human, you can't quote 80% of a large work, even if you spread it out over several related documents. It's either impractical or clearly infringement. For example, pick a work of 100 pages, and try quoting 80% over 5 different documents. At least one document is going to be quoting at least 16 pages in full, and even if you contrive to make that seem natural, it's going to be extremely difficult to reasonably quote those parts of the 100 page document which contain uninteresting content, boilerplates, introductory bits, summaries, etc, etc. Any large document tends to have an interesting core surrounded by mostly unoriginal or standard filler.

That practical limitation doesn't apply to non-human legal entities, which don't have the same physical limitations. For example, a non-human legal entity can easily perform simultaneous transactions with millions of separate legal entities in a short time frame (Google, Visa, etc), or produce many similar documents etc.

The search engine provides you with relevant excerpts only. Each search is an independent application of the system and no one search will give you a meaningful percentage of the content of a single page. Google is not a single entity cumulatively providing entire texts--there is no way to get Google to provide an entire page to you through their normal search engine in a single use.

No, the search engine isn't only providing _me_ with an excerpt, it is providing _everybody_ with a _different_ excerpt. Again, Google is a single legal entity. There would be no problem if the excerpt was the same for everybody, but it's different because it's based on the keyword being searched. It's exactly as if I photocopied a whole book, then distributed a single page to everyone I meet, I would still be infringing, because _I_ am using the _full_ work without permission.

In fact, the thing you claim is not possible to do has been done and continues to be done. There are simple ways to download a whole book one page at a time from Google's book service. Google had to change their cookie protection system precisely because of this, but even so there cannot exist a foolproof technical way to protect against that.

As I said, the only thing really protecting Google is the DMCA, which grants them immunity (under certain conditions) even though they are doing massive copyright infringement constantly.

Re:Qua?

[martin-boundary]

My point wasn't that somebody can perhaps invent some opt-out procedure that might make it easy for some particular group to opt-out, my point was that the project in TFA can come up with whatever opt-out mechanism they like, which might or might not make it easy for a particular group to opt-out.

Opt-out on its own is no legal protection. If it was, the example I gave can be used for protection, and because it is also convoluted, it can be used to make it arbitrarily difficult to use. That way, you would get legal protection without really providing opt-out.

For another example, those spammers who do offer opt-out vary the procedure in nearly each email. That's on purpose, precisely because it makes opt-out worthless while at the same time following the letter of the law.

Re:Qua?

[mr_matticus]

No, I'm afraid not. This doesn't have anything to do with Google being a single entity. Fair use entitles you to use cited excerpts within another work. Each work is independent. Again, I'll point to the possibility of writing dozens of essays on a single topic and in the course of doing so quoting a substantial portion of the original text. It is absolutely permissable, and I'd ask you not to make determinations on my level of knowledge unless you can back up your assertions with a demonstration to the contrary in case law.

I never claimed it was impossible to assemble a whole from the parts. I claimed it was impossible to retrieve the whole in a single effort. If I make hundreds of successive Google searches and piece the excerpts together, good for me. Again, please find an instance where Google provides an unfair quantity of a page to a single user.

If you photocopy an entire work at once, then you've broken fair use. Google doesn't. Google pulls the results from the pages as requested; like a library, you can go to the shelf and copy a page from a book an infinite number of times based on a patron request. Simply because Google has access to the library does not mean that it infringes upon fair use. If you come to me with a specific query and I turn to a library and conduct research and pull the appropriate pages and provide you with a copy, I'm not breaking any laws, even though the library could theoretically provide an staggering number of simultaneous copies with a high enough staff and number of photocopiers.

google should have turned a blind eye.

[troicstar]

especially to small time users. It would have generated goodwill. I'm sure their agreements with the 3rd party providers didn't stipulate not to allow other api's to be developed, merely (ab)use of the dataset by said apis. Grey areas would benefit both parties.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[FroBugg]

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.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[honkycat]

It's quite possible they were alerted to this "problem" by one of their licensors and didn't have the choice to ignore it.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[mr_matticus]

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.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[MikeBabcock]

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.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[unitron]

"...satellites don't launch themselves."

Which is probably just as well in the long run. :-)

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[Richard_J_N]

This could have been handled much better. Google ought to have offered whatever assistance necessary to help the gaia project become an offical client, perhaps by helping them to use google's API, and adding to this API if it was insufficient. Then, everyone would have been happy.

Furthermore, google's license with their upstream provider is not binding upon any 3rd party. If they want to deny access, then they should be doing so on the basis of an encrypted connection. [Actually, even that might fall foul of interoperability laws]

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[Dreben]

I've worked for both imaging vendors identified in this thread, specifically on the technical aspects of their imaging servers, and I understand their need to protect their investment(s). As a consumer of, and general hobbyist in the use of geospatial information, I'm also appreciative of Google for having done the incredible job they have with Google Earth, which is what prompted me to post the story originally. However, denying a third party API access to the same information that the Google API provides seems to border on what is fair use and what isn't. Either the data is available for free to the world via TCP or it isn't. Google, and the data vendors had a choice to NOT make the data available to the world for free. They chose to make it free. The fact that Google entered into an agreement to lease data from the vendors so they could push it to the world without charge doesn't change the fact that they did. If in fact the restrictions for reusing the imagery is written into the Google API, than they same caveat needs to be included in the GPL's API.

As far as I understand the GPL, it only protects the source code of the application, not the data it uses. Just because GIMP can manipulate proprietary imagery, doesn't put GIMP at risk of violating some proprietary license agreement. That accountability comes at the risk of the user of the software, not the GIMP developers. The same premise should hold true here.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[FinestLittleSpace]

Google aren't a f**king charity for people's pet projects.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[anthony_dipierro]

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.

I have to object to that last sentence. Getting rid of the watermarks en-masse would be a good thing, and satellite photography will continue to be made despite a lack of copyright protection over the imagery. In fact, I doubt copyright on satellite imagery would stand up to a constitutional attack addressing the fact that under Feist such photography is not copyrightable in the first place.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[Tacvek]

I have to object to that last sentence. Getting rid of the watermarks en-masse would be a good thing, and satellite photography will continue to be made despite a lack of copyright protection over the imagery. In fact, I doubt copyright on satellite imagery would stand up to a constitutional attack addressing the fact that under Feist such photography is not copyrightable in the first place.

Perhaps the original images are not copyrightable. (I suspect it may be copyrightable, due to the "creative"ness of the decisions related to camera height, location, angle, zoom, focus, exposure, etc. Remember that most photos are protected by copyright, despite recording what is more or less fact.) Even if the original images are not protected by copyright, the images used by Google earth are. The selection of pictures (to avoid clouds, avoid night photos, etc) added creativity. So did the choice of stitching algorithm, etc.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[MikeBabcock]

I have karma to burn; I'm not concerned about your opinion. That said, I thought it was a good post and didn't have moderation points to mod it up. Since I have a +1 karma bonus, I figured I'd re-post it so more people would be able to read it.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[honkycat]

It seems to me that, as a service provider, Google should be pretty much free to determine the terms under which they provide their service. If they only want to support their own software, they should be free to reject users of other software. They certainly have no obligation to support or even permit any particular user. I don't think it's reasonable to dispute this.

However, here, they appear to be asserting some sort of right to prevent others from developing tools that would allow users to have software that Google would need to deny access. I'm a bit puzzled as to what legal basis they have for this. On the other hand, they didn't go through lawyers to do it, so perhaps they have none. For whatever reason, Gaia chose to respect their request.

Personally, I think the right thing happened here, as much as I'd like to see unfettered free access to the information. Google went to great expense to produce a free-as-in-beer information repository that is extremely valuable, even within its limitations. Gaia's developers found ways to make it more useful to them, but which would jeopardize Google's ability to make the information available at all. Google asked them to stop, and the developers obliged.

As a result, Google doesn't have to clamp down further on their software, which would probably make the tool less useful to those who use it within their intended limitations. Sure, it'd be great to have freer access to the data, but it's not up to the end users to decide what their rights to the images are. It's also not up to Google. Thanks to Google, users have more information than they'd have otherwise and I don't see the basis for an entitlement to more.

Re:google should have turned a blind eye.

[datenwolf]

> 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.

I must admit, that as soon as I read about Gaia you couldn't have counted to 1 until I fed wget with the URL. But instead of thinking about a Client replacement I was thinking more about a caching proxy, i.e. using the knowledge gatherd from reading the source to build a server, that the GE Client would mistake for the official one. Then using that tool, someone could download a given area where he might not have Internet access, working there using GE to makes nots about certain landmarks (e.g. if you're a geocacher).

Honestly I think Google - or Keyhole, the original developers of the software - is to blame for the whole mess. There is practically no protection in the protocol albeit a weak encryption scheme and a session cockie and probably access resticted to HTTP clients with a special client ID. Reverse Engineering? Is it reverse engineering if your aunty makes the best cookies in the world, won't give you the reciepe, but you may watch her as she bakes them, speaking out load the contents of the reciepe with the only protection being, that she calls flour "wheat millings" water "dihydroxylacid" and butter "processed milk residue".

What could have Google done to protect the data? First step: Encrypt the whole communication. Google Earth comes with OpenSSL but seemingly it is not used. Don't want the connection been made by an arbitrary client, then use HTTPS with a shared secrect. To make sure, nobody tinkers with the SSL library compile that statically into the program (LD_PRELOAD anybody?). In fact: Link everything statically. Now were at the point where really reverse engineering must be done, at least we have to disassemble the program (EULA forbids that, but lets just assume, an attacker ignores that). You can eliminate a lot of uncertanties by looking which third party libraries GE uses (is those are statically linkes have a look into licence.txt). Compile those libraries with the same compiler like the GE binary (look into the ELF header to get that). Then perform a match of the library code against the binary. Using some heuristics we can narrow down the interesting code, eventually tinker with that.
So you must make sure, that nobody modifies the client. This can be done by scrambling the important parts of the binary and descramble them with a key, transmitted at runtime. You may choose the algorithm in a way, that you can use multiple different keys, which all produce a working code, but also have different results in a otherwise not executed section of the program. Now you need some debugger to get the code out of the program at runtime. You can hinder userspace debuggers but a kernel debugger cannot be fooled. So as a last resort you use the key dependent, otherwise unexecuted code section as P-box for a hash, that digests the in memory program image, sending back the digest to you. If that matches the one you expect you may send the data. But you still got the problem that someone could create a lookup table of all keys with all hash sums, so you add a random data sequence to, that would require to have at least a 2GiB table to cover all possibilities.

But you still missed one loophole: Someone could hook into OpenGL and catch all calls matching glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGB[A], 256, 256, 0, GL_RGB[A], GL_[UN]SIGNED_BYTE, data), because this is the internal format of the images used by GE. You could scramble the images as well and use a register combiner or a shader to unscramble, but this gets broken, too.

In the end it just leaves one conclusion: Everything you send to another's computer is sooner or later open to his access.

But there is one easy solution, which would also leave us the option of having OSS clients: Visibly watermark

It's Not Google's Data

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I immediately deleted my Google Earth

[Kagura]

Why stop there? I think this pushed me over the edge. I'm not using any Google products any longer. And I haven't just stopped there, I'm boycotting any platform that runs Google products or their searches. I'm not even using my computer right now to write this. To show my indignation, I've decided to cancel my power bill. Hell, since we're already having fun overreacting, I'm just going to run naked through the streets proclaiming the end of the world, all brought to you by Google(tm).

Good Luck

[JerkyBoy]

"...a request to cease and desist from all past, present and future development of the Gaia project."

I think they'll have trouble if they cease an desist from past development. It has my head spinning just thinking about it.

Re:Good Luck

[bcat24]

"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." -- George Orwell

But what if...

[Seoulstriker]

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"?

Re:But what if...

[badfish99]

Doing something it wasn't supposed to? But they had no contractual obligation to Google, and it wasn't unlawful. So where does the "not supposed to" come from?

Re:But what if...

[mr_matticus]

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.

What if it was Microsoft instead of Google?

[heroine]

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.

Re:What if it was Microsoft instead of Google?

[cycoj]

I think you nailed it on the head. I'm actually quite surprised, if you look around everytime something like this happens, people just follow googles request (there was also a little perl program to stitch maps from google together, IIRC he was at MIT). Either google is "transfering" some money, just react differently to google. Personally I think their request is quite unreasonable, if they don't want other programs to use their data they should encrypt it. Reverse engineering the protocol is legal in most countries of the world.

Re:What if it was Microsoft instead of Google?

[catbutt]

yes, that probably has to do with the fact that google has earned the trust of many people by their past good behaviour. It is not in the least bit irrational that people factor this in, and therefore are more likely to conclude that google is not acting maliciously in this case.

If google does enough things that shifts the balance the other way (same goes for microsoft), people will take this into account as well. This is how humans operate, and it makes plenty of sense.

I imagine you do the same with people you know, and in general, it works for you. If someone has consistantly done things that are in your interest, you are more likely to heed their advice when they say "trust me on this one". Do you consider this irrational?

Re:What if it was Microsoft instead of Google?

[evilviper]

If it was Microsoft, the kids would be screaming and it would be on every blog. Google

And if it was Mark Foley asking for a beer, instead of Cameron Diaz...

People give Google the benefit of the doubt, while they give the opposite to Microsoft, because both companies have earned it, based on their past actions. There's nothing wrong with that, at all. In fact, completely IGNORING Microsoft's history would be wrong...

Re:What if it was Microsoft instead of Google?

[John Hasler]

> 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.

_Some_ users obey...

Re:What if it was Microsoft instead of Google?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Google hasn't created an industry yet -- all they do is search and provide an awesome research environment Ph.D.s.

Huh? Google has a search engine, but they are an advertising company. I don't think anybody makes substantive money just doing search engines.

Re:What if it was Microsoft instead of Google?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Does Microsoft's mapping service have a publicly accessible API? At least Google does, and it's a lot less restrictive than Microsoft's, having one with restrictions on how you use the data vs. not having one and not having any software access to said data.

Re:What if it was Microsoft instead of Google?

[houstonbofh]

Funny... I remember when it WAS Microsoft. Microsoft was this little company battling against Big Bad IBM. The plucky spirit of this tiny company made PC Compatibles possible.

Then they grew up. Not only can the same thing happen to Google, it must. You can't be the plucky upstart fighting the establishment once you become the establishment.

Re:What if it was Microsoft instead of Google?

[MickDownUnder]

How has google earnt trust?

I really don't get this, Google must have some of the best marketing dudes in the world when everyone thinks they smell like a rose, when they're in the business of making money through profiling people. They're collecting information on people by what they search for, the emails they send and receive, if you use Google desktop search they're collecting information off your PC and thanks to Google analytics and it's very very wide adoption (view source and search for urchintracker), they're also tracking a good percentage of pages people navigate to directly or through other search engines.

Personally I would trust Microsoft more than I trust Google. I don't want a server based computing model. I don't want to edit my text documents and spreadsheets and post private information across the net to a machine I have no control over. I'd prefer to pay for services up front than get them for free at some unknown cost that I pay for with my privacy.

Microsoft knows everything they ship is open to public scrutiny. Microsoft can't hide anything from you, the code is on your machine, it can be reverse engineered. There is no way they can stop you from monitoring network traffic between Windows and the net. With Google it's a completely closed black box system. Once you post information to their servers, all you have is blind faith that infomation will not be abused.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I think having blind faith in any global corporate in this day and age is gullibility in the extreme. I don't need to have blind faith in Microsoft, I just know that their business model only works as long as their software is trusted (as opposed to their business tactics). Personally I have no sympathy for corporates no matter what trick or tactic has been used on them.

P.S To anyone with access to Slashdot's code can you please change the google analytics javascript to...

        _uacct = "UA-32013-5";
        _udn = "slashdot.org";
if (typeof urchinTracker == 'function')
        urchinTracker();

It'll save me getting javascript errors on every slashdot page I visit because I've blocked traffic from google analytics.

Future direction?

[Epsillon]

I see one possibility (actually a personal wishlist item more than anything): A GDAL based, cross-platform GPS application that can render geotiffs to a window and plot the current position for locally stored maps. Currently, the only application that does this and, even then, only just (no disrespect, I use it a lot, but maritime charts rarely fit into a 1280x1024 pixel raster) is GPSDrive. Yes, I've heard of mapd and had a few attempts to port it, but it doesn't play nice with FreeBSD. The Grass port, when it is updated, may make exporting them a bit easier than the current GIMP/cut/paste/save as/calibrate routine I currently have to put up with, but until then I'm SOL.

So, guys, since Google Earth uses GDAL (JFGI for the non believers) and gaia is already in the ports tree (with a little hackery to make it respect make.conf's CFLAGS), any chance? Or is it non-trivial?

Re:What ever happened to Do No Evil?

[Millenniumman]

That open source project was using Google's services without authorization. It not only uses their servers, but it could also get Google in trouble with the people they license their data from. How would you feel if someone routed your cable service to themselves, with the imminent possibility the cable company finds out and fines you?

I'm always looking for hot new things in portage

[scottfk]

Thanks for pointing one out, GOOG, I just emerged gaia!

matter of time

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Re:matter of time

[mr_matticus]

so what would you do if someone started selling your work for 75% cheaper than what you sell it for, and as a result, your income dropped 50% or more?

i think you'd turn to those same IP laws you violate for protection. but then when they see that you ignore them when it suits you, you'd be SOL.

Re:matter of time

[iminplaya]

But then how will I be able to make my gazillions with my new "Stone Mascot" invention?

Re:matter of time

[indil]

I see two perspectives to this problem. I'm a computer science major and hopefully a future professional software developer, so half of me agrees with your point. The other half of me thinks the opposite:

Since software is information, and information can be infinitely duplicated at little cost, I would think that basing a business model on the assumption that an idea cannot be copied is a fallacy. It's like writing a recipe for cookies and giving it to your friends. After that, you can't control what they do with your recipe. They can make cookies all day long or call up their friends and tell them the recipe. Copying software is the same thing but on a larger scale. The problem isn't that software developers are losing money, it's that they thought they could hold onto that money in the first place.

Re:matter of time

[jrockway]

All those pirated copies of SuSE Linux and RHEL are putting Novell and Red Hat out of business! I hear this http://www.kernel.org/ site lets you DOWNLOAD LINUX FOR FREE! This must be stopped; think of all the people that won't have income or even jobs if this continues! IP FOR EVAR MAN!

</sarcasm> <!-- sad that I have to have this here -->

Re:matter of time

[mr_matticus]

SuSE != Novell. SuSE isn't copying what Novell charges for--they have their own people who work on SuSE. Whether or not you release your products to the public for free is a matter of choice. You're free to give away what you create, but you're equally free not to. Anyone who accepts rational choice has to accept both sides of the coin. SuSE and Novell both generate revenue; one does it through license sales, the other has a different business plan. Neither one is simply taking someone else's work and selling it, as you suggest, in violation of any law.

If people are willing to create their own work and offer it for free, more power to them, especially when it's better than what other companies charge for. But there's a difference between theft and competition.

Re:matter of time

[PopeRatzo]

I've actually experienced the loss of income due to the copying of my work. But the solution is not trying to nail down the system further, but rather to re-think the way the work is released, and perhaps, the expectations of just how rich one is supposed to get because of a single idea or bit of creativity.

I'm glad, for example, to see that more groups are performing live in response to the widespread copying of their recordings. Now, if you just cut out the record companies, there's still a profit to be made from making and selling a well-done bit of music. And thanks to the new tech, there's a way to do just that.

Re:matter of time

[TeknoHog]

so what would you do if someone started selling your work for 75% cheaper than what you sell it for, and as a result, your income dropped 50% or more?

In a world with no IP, everyone could sell anyone's work, so there would be no point in selling it anymore.

What would remain is a special relationship between the creator and the work, which can be used for selling support services, for example. In an open IP-less world people should recognize the creator as someone who knows the product best. On the other hand, if someone else is better at the support work, then more power to them. In that kind of a world, you'd have to actually work for profit, instead of relying on artificial monopolies.

Re:matter of time

[theLOUDroom]

so what would you do if someone started selling your work for 75% cheaper than what you sell it for, and as a result, your income dropped 50% or more? i think you'd turn to those same IP laws you violate for protection. but then when they see that you ignore them when it suits you, you'd be SOL.

Or maybe he'd just create something else.

The whole concept to working for a little while and then collecting money for the rest of your entire life and then some is retarded.

A normal payment for performing a task is a much more sensible way of doing things. Or do you think cooks should be able to demand payments forever because they served you a meal? You'd be dead without food after all. It's it really important they get paid!

Re:matter of time

[mr_matticus]

You can't create something else if you can't afford the materials to do so, or the time, because he has to work as an office drone to keep food on the table. An artist's work takes practically no effort to reproduce, but a lot of time and wasted attempts lie in the creation of that first work.

It's like the pharmaceutical industry. Each pill costs a nickel to make for the knockoffs, but the first one cost millions of dollars. If they can't recoup those R&D lossees, they won't be around to make new medications, and if every pharmaceutical company collapses under the cost of a single medication, people would stop funding them in the first place, knowing it to be a failed prospect.

Artists deserve to break even at the very least on the work they put into a project. It's not about working for a little while and then sitting back and earning money. It's about working in debt and then having enough control over the results to fill in the hole and turn at least some profit. I'll give you that people often milk the successes for far too long, but preventing them from having a fair chance to recoup their losses is a ridiculous approach to the arts and sciences. Once someone finds the solution, reproducing it is trivial--but the person who solved the problem should be entitled to benefit from it, or it encourages a population where people all sit around and wait for someone else to figure something out so they can steal it.

The 'free market' doesn't reward innovation and mass market consumers place zero monetary value on creativity. They'll happily buy one of a million reprints of a painting for $10 while lusting after the $400 single-entity painting that they want. And Slashdotters will try to rig the system to get that unique $400 painting for $10, even if it means destroying the livelihood of the artist.

There's a middle ground to all of this that all of you Slashdot anarcho-jackasses refuse to entertain.

Re:matter of time

[theLOUDroom]

I don't think you get it.
There were writers and artists before copyright ever existed and they were compensated for their work. Thie difference was that they were paid for their actual work and then that was the end of it.

It's like the pharmaceutical industry. Each pill costs a nickel to make for the knockoffs, but the first one cost millions of dollars. If they can't recoup those R&D lossees, they won't be around to make new medications, and if every pharmaceutical company collapses under the cost of a single medication, people would stop funding them in the first place, knowing it to be a failed prospect.

This argument makes the faulty assumption that the only reason people do things is for money. I could give a rats ass about any industry, I care about PEOPLE! If we were to socialize heathcare, both practice and research, it would destroy an entire industry, but that's not a bad thing if the net result is positive for the citizens of this country.

even if it means destroying the livelihood of the artist.

If by "livlihood" you mean, sitting around on your ass collecting checks for work your father did eighty years ago, yes I'm perfectly fine with getting rid of that. Copyright (per the mandate in the US constitution) is supposed to be a bargain that is struck for the welfare of the PUBLIC not the artists.

I'm an engineer. I create IP for a living. I'm actually not terrified of changes to IP laws because I realize that even if all copyright and patent laws went away tomorrow, there is still a financial incentive to create, just like there was before those laws existed.
If society needs a spreadsheet program, there's nothing stopping people from pooling their money and hiring someone to write it. Copyright or no copyright.

Artists deserve to break even at the very least on the work they put into a project.

This is what it really comes down to, a sense of entitlement. Carpenter aren't guaranteed to break even, why should artists be?

Re:matter of time

[mr_matticus]

"There were writers and artists before copyright ever existed and they were compensated for their work"
Ad ignorantium. Historically, artists were commissioned and each product was handmade, so they were compensated for their time. Now, a painter can paint a painting and it can be lithographically copied for a few dollars and distributed in mass numbers. Handcrafted vases took time, skill, and imagination to produce. Now, it simply takes a machine. Without copyright, I could hire you to paint something for me, and then turn around and sell copies of it for $10/apiece which take 30 seconds to produce while the original artist is trying to compete with me by painting new works which take days to complete and cost more than $10 in raw materials alone.

Even if the artist sells prints himself, there will always be someone who can sell them more cheaply--someone who sells reproductions of 10 artists, for example, with margins so thin that the original artists can't match them while still feeding himself.

I find it particularly delicious that you mention the mandate of the Constitution. Perhaps you're not aware that the Framers were rabidly opposed to ANY devolution of property and ownership rights? They were absolutely terrified that their interests would be overruled by the masses for the sake of "fairness." Copyright MUST exist to provide an incentive for invention and creativity--you have to provide protections and benefits for inventors of new things, or all the creative people go where they can be rewarded. You have to hold the vultures at bay long enough for creative people to turn a profit before the knockoffs and reproductions can get a hold of it. There is no welfare for the public if you've wiped out all the innovative thinkers and artists; you have to encourage people to pursue new ideas, and that means rewarding them for coming up with the new idea. The inventor's creation then becomes entrusted to society upon the expiration of patent (which should never occur later than the death of the inventor). In the interim, you have licensing--it allows prices to drop rapidly while still incentivizing creators by receiving a micropayment for each iteration.

I have no problem abolishing the healthcare industry in its entirety and I'd happily pay the necessary staggeringly-high taxes to fund R&D, and I also don't have a problem with government ensuring that artists have food and shelter by massive NEA grant expansions (in return, these artists would cede that work to the public domain). But if you're the standard anti-everything Slashdotter, you want IP taken out and you also want every tax penny back. Society doesn't benefit there.

"This is what it really comes down to, a sense of entitlement. Carpenter aren't guaranteed to break even, why should artists be?"
Nobody said anything about guarantee. They should have a fair chance, is all. A carpenter can build a piece of furniture; that can't be copied without someone taking the time to build another. I pay a carpenter to remodel my kitchen, he buys the supplies and keeps the rest in exchange for his labor, but no one can immediately reproduce carpentry work for a fraction of the price I just paid for it. No machine can match the finish of handcrafted furniture with the precision that audio, video, or art can be reproduced, nor can it be accomplished at anything remotely similar to the same rate. Further, carpenters may be protected by IP if they come up with something new or innovative in design or technique. If they're just assembling the same chair that they've been making for 50 years, they get paid for their labor, but they haven't invested anything else into it. With a lithograph, you don't have to pay the machine for labor.

The overarching theme is this: if society wants free access to artwork, then society needs to pool together and commission all the artists. Then, we could look through a catalog of the paintings and then pay the materials cost of a print a

Re:matter of time

[theLOUDroom]

Ad ignorantium. Historically, artists were commissioned and each product was handmade, so they were compensated for their time. Now, a painter can paint a painting and it can be lithographically copied...

You still don't get it. Without the first one, there aren't any to copy. That is why artists will still be paid even without copyright. I'm not going to make the first one until you pay me. You can make as many copies as you want but you will not have anything to copy unless I get paid.

I find it particularly delicious that you mention the mandate of the Constitution. Perhaps you're not aware that the Framers were rabidly opposed to ANY devolution of property and ownership rights?

Apparently you haven't actually READ the constitution. Try reading the section where it mentions copyright. It's very cleary seperate from the sections dealing with actual physical property. They go so far as to explicitly say that copyright shall be for a limited time only after which it reverts to the public, a very stark contrast to the statements they make regarding real property. Lawrence Lessig, in his book "Free Culture" goes into this is detail. You are simply wrong on this point.

Nobody said anything about guarantee.

Actually you did:
"Artists deserve to break even at the very least on the work they put into a project."

There is no welfare for the public if you've wiped out all the innovative thinkers and artists

This is simply BS. It is a demonstrable fact that thinkers and artists existed BEFORE copyright. To suggest that the abolishment of copyright would lead to the total cessation of invention and creativity shows an ignorance of both history and the motives of both scientists and artists.

Re:matter of time

[mr_matticus]

And you're still skimming past the fundamental flaw in your theory: there WON'T be any first ones for anyone to copy if the artist can't afford to produce them. No one is willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a painting anymore without exclusivity (knowing that there won't be thousands of the same painting on thousands of walls across the country).

If you look carefully at the origins of copyright law (you'll have to look past the blathering Lessig and turn to England), you'll find that it exists specifically to reward original thinkers with monetary benefits such that they can enjoy the benefit of being first. You might try reading the Constitution yourself before accusing others (quite possibly with a much higher degree of involvement) of not knowing what it says. But then again, if you can't distinguish between "Artists deserve to break even" and "artists should be guaranteed to break even" then I guess I shouldn't expect much.

I'm not saying that artists should be able to make one good painting and sit back for the rest of their lives. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find one real artist who produced a single work of such staggering genius that it allowed them to do nothing else. For every success, there are dozens (sometimes even hundreds) of failures. You get paid for all the hours and all the attempts you put into your work--if it takes you 200 hours to solve a problem through 8 failed solutions, you still get paid for them all. An artist making lots of money on his one success is more than fair if he's spent time enduring his failures.

Re:matter of time

[nosferatu1001]

I think the point is that, if you hire someone to create a piece of art .,you pay them time and materials - for example, when you build a house you normally provide cash to the builders to buy the raw materials. same used to happen for painters and other artists!

Then, if you've paid for this unique work of art, [i] why would you let it get copied! [/i] Unless you wanted to, and if so, so what!

Copyright should be reduced to 25 years, flat. not life + 70, 25 years. I dont see hwy the public should not have the benefit of access just so someone can produce 1 work and never work again.

Re:matter of time

[theLOUDroom]

And you're still skimming past the fundamental flaw in your theory

This flaw you see is simply not there. There is nothing preventing an individual or group from fronting money for a work to be created. And they could always take out a loan, the way other businesses do. Or is that too much of an inconvenience for the poor, disadvantaged artists?

No one is willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a painting anymore without exclusivity

You state this as though it's a fact when it's merely your opinion. You can't possibly know what I or most other people on this planet would be willing to pay. The existence of portrait artists, wedding photographers and the like points very strongly in the opposite direction.

In general, you foolishly continue to ignore major flaws in your argument. You fail to respond to any actual statements I made regarding the constitution. I read it. I told you what it says. A posted a link to someone else, an expert in the field, backing me up. You have not posted anything to counter my own or Lessig's argument beyond "That's not what it says!"
Prove a factual inaccuracy, a flaw in reasoning or STFU.

Re:matter of time

[theLOUDroom]

You've got the right idea, but I believe it goes even further than that.

There no reason that one guy has to pay for one initial copy. The are thousands of businesses that need accounting software. There's no reason they can't form a working group, pool some money and hire someone to write it.

Personally, I'm suprised this already doesn't happen more often. Too many businesses allow software vendors to hold their businesses hostage. Companies make massive investments in infrastructure over which they have no control.

Re:matter of time

[mr_matticus]

"You state this as though it's a fact when it's merely your opinion. You can't possibly know what I or most other people on this planet would be willing to pay."
Look at the current market. How many people commission paintings these days? That number surely would not increase with the revocation of copyright but would rather decrease. By how much, no one can say. Original artwork would have no alternative but to decrease in volume if the artist had zero protection from reproduction and infringement.

You're not responding to the key flaws in your own argument--you are paid a salary and you can afford to waste time on a number of failed solutions and "wrong path" work attempts because the end solution is financed equally as the other attempts. Creators of artwork, in your view, should be forced to eat the cost of their exploratory or development time and only be paid for the single solution. Would you like to be paid for only a fraction of the time and effort you put into a successful project?

You'd also be hard pressed to take out loans if you had zero mechanism to pay them back. You'd drown in debt almost immediately and no one would give you a loan. With the modern reproduction technology removing the time and expense of creating copies, there is no appropriate historical analog--artists working before government copyright were not facing the same conditions that they do today, something you've been too dense to admit. Furthermore, you bounced right past the point that copyright was specifically included in the Constitution (a document infamous for ambiguity and narrow scope) and more credible constitutional experts (Beard, Balkin, Greenwald, et al.) who find Lessig's stance to be laughable at best. The inclusion of these protections was an important decision designed to reward artists and provide them with a mechanism to profit from their craft in a field where corporate protection does not exist. Artists aren't salaried and they've no corporate health care plans, retirement packages, or free supplies and tools to the trade. They live and die on the sales of their work, and the Framers recognized the need to protect innovative thinkers. Beyond that, it's clear that communal property and the public domain were always intended to be bounded, that equality was never meant to be absolute. Equality of opportunity, a basic tenet of classical liberalism, holds that artists should have a fair opportunity to pay their own way.

There are any number of flaws and misconceptions in your argument, which I've pointed out repeatedly and you've blithely pretended they don't exist. You have no evidence which conclusively supports your theory, nor do you seem to have an appreciation for the nature and challenges unique to artists and inventors.

Here's a simple example. You paint each week to pay your bills, making four paintings, only one of which is a critical and commercial success each week. Your materials cost is $150, and you sell the paintings for $450. That gives you $300 a week to handle all of your expenses. You have to pay for a private health care plan, because the government doesn't provide anything, and you don't get sick leave or vacation time. You make less than $20,000 a year, but work 60 hours a week. People, if they could, would grudgingly pay a hair above cost for your paintings and would have no regard for your wellbeing--they just want the cheapest painting possible. People expect you to come up with something new each and every week--they're not interested in paying for your labor (unlike repetitive office jobs) because they can just buy prints of your previous works, and if you stop creating, people stop buying.

The fair exchange is that if society wants free and total access to artwork, then they should assume the burden of feeding and sheltering artists. But you can't simply take from the artists and expect them to carve their own path. Creators are the only people whose labor is worthless to the market, so they do deserve some form of just compensation to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to live comfortably.

But you bore me, don't have a leg to stand on, and you're a jackass, so I'm finished with you.

Re:matter of time

[theLOUDroom]

Creators of artwork, in your view, should be forced to eat the cost of their exploratory or development time and only be paid for the single solution.

Not true. I never said no one would be willing to pay for their material up front. This is something the market would work out the same way it does for people who build houses. They could take out a loan or they could be paid in advance. It's not a hard concept. Just think about how any other business that doesn't rely on copyright operates. They have costs too. Stating that artists have costs therefore they must be treated differently, is actually pointing at something the have in common with other businesses.

But you bore me, don't have a leg to stand on

That's funny, because you seem to be the one making easily disprovable assertions. Funny how you gave up your raving about the constitution....

Oh shit! Mike Jones is coming to get you...

[Tatsh]

"I am Michael Jones, the Chief Technologist of Google Earth, Google Maps, and
Google Local search writing to the author(s) of the Gaia project (
http://gaia.serezhkin.com/) with an urgent concern. We have now become aware
of your efforts and are concerned that you may not understand the developing
global social impact of your engineering creativity."

MIKE JONES!
*gets his gat*

Re:Oh shit! Mike Jones is coming to get you...

[f8l_0e]

Your sarcasm is amusing, but what you don't understand is that this guys cousin is Dick Jones. If the Gaia team didn't back off, he was going to send an ED-209 over to deal with them.

Re:Oh shit! Mike Jones is coming to get you...

[Dachannien]

Pop culture lesson comin' at yo' ass, beotch!

Re:Oh shit! Mike Jones is coming to get you...

[f8l_0e]

Pop culture, the quintessential oxymoron.

Re:use nasa instead

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

Really? Whats the URL to a Linux compatible client?

What is the hoohah about?

[goldcd]

"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..

Re:What is the hoohah about?

[SpinyNorman]

Exactly.

Nothing here to get remotely excited about.

Dumb asses start visualization project without data to visualize. News at 11.

Re:What is the hoohah about?

[HuguesT]

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.

Re:What is the hoohah about?

[jrockway]

> Please note that it is not an open-and-shut case here that what Gaia was doing was illegal, only detrimental to Google.

Whoa, are you sure about that? What law was the Gaia project violating?

Sure, Google is violating their agreement by letting anyone download the map data, but whose fault is that? If something confidential is posted on a company website, should KDE be sued because I used Konqueror to download it?

Fuck no. Google needs to secure their map data so unauthorized clients can't get it.

Re:What is the hoohah about?

[larytet]

NASA already "collectively" sends satellites. Ask uncle Sam to to release high definition photos. I bet that military has something to be proud of too in terms of high definition (and 3D) photography including UV and infrared photos in some cases with resolution as high as 3 meters or less and frequency every couple of hours. I read somewhere that NASA films so much, that they have problems with the storing of the data, leave alone processing. The best part - "we" already paid for it by paying taxes.

Re:What is the hoohah about?

[HuguesT]

Sorry my sentence was not very readable, I wrote exactly what you mean : I don't think what Gaia was doing was illegal.

Open Dependencies

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:Open Dependencies

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

To clarify, we have not asked the Gaia authors to stop developing the program, only to stop accessing Google Earths database. Once the author has pulled the GE download code, he is free to retarget it to say the NASA World Wind imagery and carry on, we have no problems with that.

Re:Open Dependencies

[in7ane]

It would seem that it's libgefetch that Google have a problem with - specifically the 'authentication' part: /**
  * Internal function to authenticate at Google server
  *
  * Mimics Google Earth's behavior (and uses data actually copypasted
  * from tcpdump) - does two HTTP requests and awaits second one to
  * contain 80 byte session ID. This SID is stored in gefetch handle
  * and used in later requests, giving access to imagery and other data.
  */

However, the 'authentication' (as far as I can see) is not something that would fall under the definition of a secure connection (I accept that it's more 'secure' than the encoded keyhole URLs in maps.google.com) as you would have a hard time arguing that something that is provided over unencrypted HTTP is not a freely accessible resource.

Think of this as Firefox's user agent switcher mimicking IE6's behavior to make IE only sites reply with their content.

Google's licensing agreements are their own, and have nothing to do with third parties - either their agreements say that they can provide unrestricted access to the imagery or they say that the imagery needs to be DRMed to only be accessible inside Google's applications. If the second scenario is in fact the case, then Google solves nothing by having Gaia pulled while keeping their existing connection setup.

Re:Open Dependencies

[in7ane]

It is the people who run the program that are accessing the Google Earths database, not the author. It would seem the author is free to do whatever he wants, and it would not matter much if 'you' had a problem with that - he is based in Russia, hence the nice letter from Michael Jones rather than legal threats :) Having said that, I fully agree that this probably puts Google in breach of their licensing agreements with the data providers, which can only adversely affect the users as well as Google.

Re:Open Dependencies

[anthony_dipierro]

Once the author has pulled the GE download code, he is free to retarget it to say the NASA World Wind imagery and carry on, we have no problems with that.

But, that would defeat the whole purpose. World Wind is already free software.

Re:Open Dependencies

[Dreben]

The problem with this is the "so many standards to chose from" scenario. There are numerous applications available, many of them open source, (OpeNDAP, GDAL, PostGIS, DODS, etc.), that can read from and write to the plethora of geospatial data interfaces available. GE appears to be written to do just that from some limited finite number of these data interfaces, albeit, if one of the above posts is correct, using Frank Warmerdam's Geographic Data Abstraction Layer (GDAL) library. Gaia was obviously written specifically to query and retrieve data just from GE. Not much point in writing an API that does exactly what GDAL does.

Re:Open Dependencies

[Doc Ruby]

Then use the GDAL API, but not hardwired to the GE data. Google can't stop Gaia from using the GDAL API, and probably can't/won't stop Gaia from pointing their GDAL calls at GE data by default (or no default), if there are other sources. Then it's the Gaia users who are choosing to use GE data, which strengthens the point that Gaia isn't actually using the GE data, but rather enabling Gaia users to do so. Gaia users could be subject to Google C&D, but there's really very little way for Google to stop Gaia from just using an independent API and allowing Gaia to use GE data at the user's discretion.

So properly coding the data access to use the standard meta-API, with selectable choices of data sources, eliminates the dependency on GE data, and probably also Google's ability to make even arguments with Gaia.

Google apologists? WTF

[TheNetAvenger]

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?

Re:Google apologists? WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Not Google's IP, Google licenses it under specific terms.

Re:Google apologists? WTF

[shog9]

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.

Why does that surprise you? MS, at least until recently, had absolutely no reason (from a business standpoint) to be loved or even looked at kindly. Respected, yes. Feared, sure. But loving users don't make you money unless they're also loving buyers (in the case of Apple), or loving ad-clickers (in the case of Google). Love doesn't put Windows on millions of computers, and love doesn't bring in volume licenses for Word.

You might as well act surprised that people vote for the guy running for office instead of the cranky guy who shoots at neighborhood cats...

Re:Google apologists? WTF

[TheNetAvenger]

You might as well act surprised that people vote for the guy running for office instead of the cranky guy who shoots at neighborhood cats...

But isn't the cranky cat shooter now vice president?

Re:Licensing rear ends.

[Jugalator]

No, they're of course free to keep violating their terms of use just to see where that brings them.

I feel so dirty now...

[way2trivial]

You are wrong

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=cute+kittens &mkt=en-us&FORM=LVSP

cute kittensPage 1 of 1,631,025 results

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie =UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-09,GGLD:en&q=cute+kitten s
    Results 1 - 10 of about 2,120,000 for cute kittens

that means google is about 25% more cute kittens.

Re:I feel so dirty now...

[drawfour]

Yes, but Google likes it when mean dogs eat cute kittens:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=mean+dogs +eating+cute+kittens
Results 1 - 10 of about 679,000 for mean dogs eating cute kittens. (0.09 seconds)

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=mean+dogs+ea ting+cute+kittens&mkt=en-US&form=QBNO
mean dogs eating cute kittensPage 1 of 40,114 results

So Google is almost 17 times more likely to watch and laugh when mean dogs are eating cute kittens.

Re:I immediately deleted my Google Earth

[georgeav]

I'm just going to run naked through the streets proclaiming the end of the worldBeta
, all brought to you by Google(tm).

Re:Crap,

[Jugalator]

Heh, it's clear you're not working for e.g NAVTEQ, TANA, or TeleAtlas. In that case you'd say the opposite.

How is this violating the license?

[edxwelch]

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

Re:How is this violating the license?

[westlake]

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.

the burner has multiple uses. the Gaia API only one. "providing the means" was suffiencient to sink Napster.

Re:How is this violating the license?

[s7uar7]

It's nothing like the manufacturer of a CD burner. A CD burner can be used for numerous legal purposes, whereas gaia could only be used if you break the Google license agreement.

Re:How is this violating the license?

[pruss]

But it's pretty hard to develop the client software without actually testing it, and the testing would violate the ToS.

Re:How is this violating the license?

[larytet]

yes, agree

Gaia probably reverse engineered some code or used open API, but this is legal in many countries. I do not see how Google can insist on removing the source code. This is more or less the same what RIIA does when requires to remove URL links from the WEB sites to the copyright material. Let say that i do not see clear difference.

Gaia project manager could decide to obey. Other developers in the project can continue the development. eDonkey magnet link above proves that it is close to impossible to prevent such thing from happening in case there is a person who thinks that the project deserves to survive.

Re:How is this violating the license?

[edxwelch]

Maybe I used a bad example.
Take a chipped playstation, or a radar detector, both are sold legally (at least where I live) and both have only one purpose, to break the law

Re:use nasa instead

[Millenniumman]

NASA's data isn't nearly as good. The resolution is poor for most places. Beyond that, NASA has no non-windows client, and the windows only one they have isn't as good.

Re:I immediately deleted my Google Earth

[Cyberax]

I'm sorry to inform you, but Slashdot uses Google Advertisement and Google Analytics. So please cease to post here.

Google handled it well

[Glomek]

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.

We are all guilty of sin.

[TapeCutter]

"They shouldn't accept licenses that forces them to do evil. Kinda like not operating in countries where the laws force them to do evil."

I suppose Google shouldn't except cash either since it's the "root of all evil". OTOH: Trying to conform to everyone else's conflicting definitions of "evil", will in turn cast evil on their shareholders bank accounts and retirement funds.

"Do no evil" is a slogan that represents the founders ideals, it is not and has never been, a business plan! How many mega-corp "mission statements" can you point to that are as succinct, memorable and thought provoking as google's? Most of the ones I see ramble on about apple pie and boil down to nothing more than "Our company is the best, give us your money......please?".

rm -rf ~/google-earth

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Crap,

[i_ate_god]

"Can I borrow this book?"
"No."
"What, why not?"
"It's not mine."
"So?"
"So I can't lend you something that isn't mine."
"You're not good! You're evil!"

Google doesn't own the images. Gaia was using those images through Google. If Gaia was using those images through Google, and Google didn't own them, then it's up to Google to flex some muscle and make it stop.

Some building datasets as open alternative

[brewsterkahle]

Open source projects may want to build on open content otherwise this type of problem could come up repeatedly.

Jared Benedict of the Libre Map Project and over 100 map "liberators" have started this collection:

http://www.archive.org/details/maps_usgs

a start-- lets build on it.

-brewster
Internet Archive

From TFA...

[CharonX]

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.

Re:From TFA...

[HarryCaul]

Gosh, I hope that no one who published the books Google wants to put online made a similar agreement with anyone.

Re:From TFA...

[fatphil]

Or news agencies...

Re:From TFA...

[chance2105]

So why make the API available? Is it so they can go around telling people not to use it?

Fundamental misunderstanding

[Richard_J_N]

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.

Re:Fundamental misunderstanding

[Thomas Miconi]

for example, I make my website accessible to googlebot without restriction (including indexing, caching etc). In return, google is available to me.

That really blew my mind. Are you really suggesting that the value of your website (which you so generously "offer" to googlebot) is even remotely comparable to that of the services that Google provides ?

Well there's another "fundamental assumption" which you seem to have misunderstood: this assumption is that it actually costs money to set up the GooglePlex and accumulate the data that Google provides (or, in this case, to buy it from people who send goddamn satellites in orbit).

Now apparently some people, such as you, hold a deep conviction that putting up three pages of HTML gives them an inalienable right to access this data and use it as they please. Even when Google finds a way to let people access the data for free, with only very minor requirements (please use our own API, don't link directly to the data, thank you), people like you still regard this as an intolerable infringement of their God-given right to enjoy the fuit of other people's work (and investment). "Hey, I let you index my blog, so your data is mine !".

Now this poses a problem to us, the rest of the world: should we allow people like you to do as they please with anything that's accessible on the intraweb, or should we allow Google to enforce the terms of its contract with the original data providers ? On the one hand, we risk losing access to your website. On the other hand, we risk losing an enormous amount of data, provided to the entire world at no cost. Hmmm, tough call.

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".

"Intellectual property" is an enshrinement of reciprocity in law. Its purpose is to protect said reciprocity (and the benefits it provides) from freeloaders such as, say, you.

Re:Fundamental misunderstanding

[Richard_J_N]

Of course I'm not being so arrogant as to claim that my website is as valuable to the world as google! What I claim is that the value I provide to the web is a fair exchange for the value that the web provides to *me*. [This is only a specific example; the phrasing is clearer that way than if we start talking about parties 'A' and 'B'].
Now, because data costs (almost) nothing to duplicate, the web can easily cope with a large population who haven't contributed (yet) with their own content. The gift of this data is freely given to all humanity. However the moral "price of admission to the web" is just to contribute, if you can. Please remember that there are millions of stakeholders in the web. Don't compare google to an individual author but to the set of all web authors.

P.S. As it happens, my personal web contribution is quite significant (thousands of hours). But even the people who do only put up a few simple pages are still contributing, and they *are* pulling their weight.

P.P.S. "IP" is an enshrinement of the *denial* of reciprocity in law.

Evil

[Nom du Keyboard]

1: Anything involving lawyers is Evil.
2: Anything holding back Open Source is Evil.
3: Anything involving big corporations against the little guy just trying to make the world a better place is Evil.

That's Three Strikes, Google.

Gaia's speed, and FreeBSD too

[Ragica]

I had heard of Gaia, and was going to try it on my laptop (Gentoo) ... but forgot about it. Then I saw it come into the FreeBSD ports tree at an opportune moment and so I built it on my FreeBSD desktop system. When i ran it I at first couldn't figure out if it was doing anything. All I had was a map of the world which I could grab and move... I was about to give up (without reading any docs of course!) when i accidentally hit my scroll wheel.... ZOOOOM.

I have google earth installed on a windows box and play with it from time to time. But (granted that box is older and more limited than the FreeBSD box -- though it does have a much better video card in it) it runs pretty distressing slow... chews up the system resources. Gaia on my freebsd box was *fast*. Amazingly fast. And therefore fun! Sure I didn't have any UI to speak of, could not look up addresses or landmarks... but i was soon zooming in to any place i was interested in and finding my own way around, and having more fun doing it in the fast minimal interface than I ever had in google earth.

Also it was so nice to see in native 64 freebsd bits... i don't think I'll ever see Google's offerings come to my platform of choice ... ever (except of course in the annoying form of Linux emulation). )-:

Alas, the very next day I see the news about the take down....

Sigh.

Re:Gaia's speed, and FreeBSD too

[larytet]

there is OSS http://ww2d.org/home.php

Mirror, Mirror on the wall...

[sethstorm]

...those of Stanford elitism couldnt stop the Ivory Tower's fall.

if it is a problem with 3rd party date, then...

[ezh]

Google could make its own open source project. All they need to do is to hire Gaia's creator to keep working on it. Then it would not violate terms of licensing with satellite data providers. Google's Gaia could offer simpler functionality than Google Earth or Google Eearch Plus, but still workable and useful on multiple and exotic platforms. my 2 cents.

Google is far worse

[turing_m]

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!

Re:I'm always looking for hot new things in portag

[EMeta]

I think you misinterpret Google's interest. They don't care what you do. They just don't want to be sued under breach of contract. Their C&D removes their liability, and thus allows you to keep using their data via Gaia (or whatever) if you're a user who cares not about such laws.

Hypocrasy

[geekoid]

Google makes billions using other peoples data threatens to sue company for using the data Google provides an API for.

Re:Crap,

[geekoid]

Google doesn't own the websites the link to, yet they still manage to make billions.

Your right

[geekoid]

nobody should be allowed to link to data they don't own.

I didn't agree to let goole list my site, nor did millions of others.

Yes, for some reason that didn't stop goole. I wonder what they reason could be.....oh wait, I can think of billions of reasons...

Gaia acced the data directly?

[frdmfghtr]

I'm confused...gaia was accessing the data directly instead of via the Google Earth API?

This part of the letter seems to have a dose of overacting to it:

The kindness through which Google has made the wonder of our planet
available to more than 100 million users around the world is now threatened
-- not by a menacing and fierce business competitor -- but by you. Please
hear the seriousness in this statement. I am not an attorney. I am not
posturing. Just the opposite. We on the engineering team are hopeful that
despite the risk your actions (break the ToS, reverse engineer parts of the
data protection mechanisms, publish the fact and code, encourage others)
pose to our product, team, company, and users, we remain hopeful that this
was an unintended result of what started as intellectual curiosity by a
smart engineer like ourselves who has a passion to learn how things work.

Yeah, I'm sure that the gaia project was a threat to Google. A bit melodramatic, aren't you Mr. Jones?

Not having used Google Earth, what difference does it make accessing the images via the Google Earth API versus directly?

Re:Gaia acced the data directly?

[anthony_dipierro]

Yeah, I'm sure that the gaia project was a threat to Google. A bit melodramatic, aren't you Mr. Jones?

Not that much. The idea is that if Gaia got popular the people who claim copyright on the images would stop letting Google distribute them. Google would then have to scrap Google Earth or buy/find/make images under a less restrictive license agreement. Jones is implying that they would choose the former, though more likely they would choose the latter.

Not having used Google Earth, what difference does it make accessing the images via the Google Earth API versus directly?

Probably don't have those nasty watermarks and copyright notices embedded in them that way.

At least they got Google's attention

[Exp315]

My company has tried three times to get a response from Google's sales team on the cost of licensing Google Earh for a commercial application. The only response each time has been a canned auto-reply on how to download Google Earth. Now I know what we need to do! We'll have our web site violating Google's data licensing terms up shortly, and then we'll sit back and wait for their legal team to get in touch. :-)

Re:At least they got Google's attention

[tomchurchill]

We'd be more than happy to return your phone calls: See http://www.churchillnavigation.com/aurora.wmv for an example app built using our engine. (e-mail: info@churchillnavigation.com)

Re:At least they got Google's attention

[IamTheRealMike]

Heya, the emails you received should have had instructions for contacting a sales person in it - did it not?

Buy a GPS, write some standards

[xixax]

The sooner we all buy GPSs and share/aggregate tracks of our local streets, the sooner we will have a better, more current product than the street maps that GE currently licences from traditional mapping agencies. This is an area where public data collection ought to cream anything a centralised/aggregated approach can do (certainly in terms of currency).

GE is neat but the main innovation it offers is ready access to large volume of base data.

Xix.

Re:Buy a GPS, write some standards

[Aage]

Take a look at OpenStreetMap.

There are actually several instances where OSM mappers have mapped out streets which don't exist on any other publically available maps.

Guys...

[Shados]

Google pays for that data, and they are bound by contracts and license agreements to only use it in certain ways. While i'm sure part of the decision is for their own benifits, it still doesn't change that most likely, as part of the agreement, Google has a responsability to make sure that data isn't used in ways that did not conform with said agreement.

Re:For anyone who wants to carry on

[larytet]

or HTTP server http://www.kw.kernel.org/pub/mirrors/gentoo/distfi les/gaia-0.1.0.tar.bz2

"small gesture"?

[pedantic bore]

I think we are going to send him a T-Shirt or something to try and make up for it.

I think you overestimate the magical powers provided by such a shirt, or their exclusivity.

This is adding insult to injury. I suspect that the poster, rather than being a Google employee, is actually a troll.

Why did they even start the project?

[shrik3]

Why did a project like this even get started? Was it the "OMG Google" factor?

Didn't they know that we already have World Wind which is Free as in Freedom and Beer and also OSI compliantly licensed?

Re:Why did they even start the project?

[larytet]

unfortunately no Linux there too ... how fast the server is ?

API is win32 only :(

[giggls]

While digging around for Information about the google-earth API I figured out, that this API is WIN32 only!

How absurd is this? Just the Linux Version of GE seems to be non-scriptable!

Sven

Re:API is win32 only :(

[larytet]

try http://ww2d.org/home.php

completely OSS, uses provided by NASA data

I don't know...

[Poromenos1]

I rather like Google's "please stop, you're making us a saaaad panda" approach. At any rate, it's far better than "I AM ATTORNEY OF BORG, DESIST OR YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED". I think it could work even without IP laws.

Re:I don't know...

[LordSnooty]

I have to agree, and one wonders if the attitude towards the music industry would be different today if they'd adopted this approach - speaking personally with the developer/music downloader instead of through a lawyer, and offering them the chance to simply stop rather than threatening costly penalties.

Re:Where to find

[XPulga]

MOD parent up.

What about Google's use unlicensed data?

[code shady]

In particular, the 3D model of Downtown buffalo.

This model has been a several years long labor of one of the profs in the planning/arch department at University of Buffalo. Yet somehow, mysteriously, this exact same modle ened up in google earth, without attribution. No one at UB is admitting to doing it, but I can't help but wonder where this data came from.

Anyone out there that can clue me in?

Re:What about Google's use unlicensed data?

[tomchurchill]

Yes, the model Google is using is copyright Sanborn. Toggle the 3D buildings layer on and off, and observe the copyright notice. Complete details on Sanborn's CitySets products (including the Buffalo data) are available here: http://www.sanborn.com/products/citysets.htm

Guerilla software development

[alexandre]

http://cryptnet.net/fdp/crypto/guerrilla-devl.html

Stop being censored, develop anonymously! ;-)

Re:What ever happened to Do No Evil?

[anthony_dipierro]

That open source project was using Google's services without authorization.

Actually, the open source project was creating software which helped others use Google's services without authorization.

How would you feel if someone routed your cable service to themselves, with the imminent possibility the cable company finds out and fines you?

I'd feel like getting a new cable company. Of course, I don't have cable...

This quandary is actually a good reason not to use proprietary data. The argument would be similar to this one made by RMS: "As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. Cooperation is more important than copyright. But underground, closet cooperation does not make for a good society. A person should aspire to live an upright life openly with pride, and this means saying ``No'' to proprietary software." - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html

Excellent...

[oglueck]

... as I was just working on an ebuild for it...

Simple. Google has an agreement with someone else.

[Tokerat]

Google has an agreement with 3rd parties to use their information a certain way.

Google's own API complies with the terms of the agreement and can change in the future should there ever be a need. it is a liability , but a controlled one.

Gaia's API isn't controlled by Google. Should Google decide to change the limit or scope of the data which can be accessed from their 3rd party API, Gaia might decide they don't want to comply with Google's new standard and continue the old ways.

Google could be considered under breach of contract with whomever owns the data.


Just like how I can't rent out cars I'm currently renting from other rental agencies.

Sorry Brin. No Memory Hole for Stanfordites.

[sethstorm]

Try the cache.

Delete program

[Kirth]

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).

Why would anyone do so? Its says "GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, June 1991" in the Licence.

Of course, the gaia-team has received a cease-and-desist letter, but there is no reason for other people not to continue on it until they get a cease-and-desist letter as well and so on..

Google wouldn't be alone...

[sethstorm]

Anything involving an entity that insists on acting like it's still a department at an exclusive college.
Anything involving an entity that thinks the Midwest is just flyover country with a few ski resorts on the western edge is evil.
Anything involving an entity that thinks freedom is something obtainable by forsaking those of your own country.

Hrm. That'd include a Country Club Conservative who cant take the heat of criticism, the US's self-titled IDF spokesman who does the same, the infamous union busters who need not be glorified with a name, and Google.

Misery does love company.

Court costs $$$ ( was Re:I don't get it either)

[FacePlant]

In your case, simply linking to a page available on a public webpage should not warrant a lawsuit - and if a lawsuit is bought, the plaintiff should be laughed out of court and properly fined for wasting everybody elses time and also jailed for the civil version of entrapment.

But YOU still have to PAY your lawyer and waste a whole bunch of your time.
It costs too much money to go to court with idiots, and while idiotic, that is what they're counting on.

google - another evil (US) corporation

[CommanderIsm]

google is the bad guy in all this - americans are used to having their lives run by corporations - corporations whose only reason for being is to make more profit and fcuk anything else - if they ever did anything that was good to anyone not in their corporation it would be by accident - break up all corporations - they are evil, in every sense of the word - anybody self-deluded or google employess who somehow find good in google's action are stupid or american - is it not true that half americans don't believe in evolution and the other half believe saddam hussein blew up the twin towers and had weapons of mass destruction - perhaps that's not fair but i'm sure you gat my point. google the data retention company that one day will sell all it knows, should be known henceforth as Go-Ogle!