Gaia Project Agrees To Google Cease and Desist

Dreben writes "Gaia, an opensource project to develop a 3D API to Google Earth, has decided to comply with a request from Google. The search giant's Chief Technologist, Michael Jones, contacted the project with a request to cease and desist from all past, present and future development of the Gaia project. Amongst other things, they cited 'improper usage of licensed data,' which Google licenses from assorted third party vendors. They are going so far as to request anyone who has ever downloaded any aspect of Gaia to purge all related files. From the post to the freegis-l mail list: 'We understand and respect Google's position on the case, so we've removed all downloads from this page and we ask everybody who have ever downloaded gaia 0.1.0 and prior versions to delete all files concerned with the project, which include source code, binary files and image cache (~/.gaia).' How does such a request, likely to have turned into a demand, affect fair usage? While the API is intended to interface with the the Google Earth service, Google Earth is nothing without the data. Yet at the same time, Google openly publishes their own API which uses the same data in the same manner."

I 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.

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.

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.

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.)

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: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: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.

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.

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"?

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: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 [digitalglobe.com]) 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: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.

[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: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.

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: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: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.

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.

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: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: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: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: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: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: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.

Re:Google apologists? WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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: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.

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.

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.

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: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: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.

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 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: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.

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.