Google Claims a TOS Violation On RouteBuilder For Using the Map API (medium.com) 130
New submitter acm writes: RouteBuilder has been using the Google Maps API to help people share their routes (bicycling, hiking, etc) for a decade. Last week, Google sent an email demanding Routebuilder stop using the API: "In particular,your application violates clause 10.4(c), which does not allow developers to create a wrapper — an application that re-implements or duplicates the Google Maps website or mobile app, or any of the Google Maps APIs."
Why did it take the Google Maps Team 10 years to decide they don't want pedometer-type sites to use their API?
because (Score:5, Insightful)
because they're about to launch their own pedometer type site?
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Now it fits to the "wearables" trend.
Who decided what and when? (Score:3)
Why did it take the Google Maps Team 10 years to decide
Google didn't take 10yrs to decide they don't want wrappers, they "decided" that when they wrote the terms of service.
Some pertinent questions.
When did routebuilder "decide" to ignore the TOS?
When did google "decide" to do something about it?
How does anyone know for certain what's in a TOS agreement if nobody ever reads it?
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I wonder about other sites that do the same thing. I know of at least one site that's been doing this longer than Routebuilder and AFAIK have not announced a shutdown.
Re: Who decided what and when? (Score:2)
Right, like American track and field and countless others. All the more reason to use Open Street Map.
Re:because MONEY (Score:4, Insightful)
When you don't understand the reason look to the money.
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And why would this be an issue? Google gives away free use of the Maps API under certain restrictions. Why, being the developer, owner, and indeed the host of all the Google Maps infrastructure, shouldn't they be able to restrict people without commercial licenses from competing with their products? Google is not a commune, it's a company.
Re:because MONEY (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, there's OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org], which all third-parties should be using since, as TFA proves, using the Google Maps API is not safe.
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Well, there's OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org], which all third-parties should be using since, as TFA proves, using the Google Maps API is not safe.
Indeed, and it's nice of the /. editors to send us all this reminder of the fact that you shouldn't ever build anything that depends on a "service" provided by just one company. They can and sometimes do terminate such services, often without notice, or modify them so what you're using them for no longer works. And they tend to get access to all the info about your stuff, to use as they like.
In particular, any organization that depends on a company's service is run by fools. You might be able to use s
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Sane companies are not built to be eternal, and certainly are not built to be immediately and eternally stable. Anyone who discards solutions because they are not infinitely viable is a fool.
The most effective company strategy has been "the startup": create a product which works *now*, if only as a proof-of-concept. Attract investors who will allow that proof-of-concept to become a longer-term solution. Die fast. Repeated effort is not wasted effort, as you literally cannot predict which differences from it
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How could they have performed a bait and switch when the TOS of the API haven't changed?
This has always been against the TOS, if routebuilder doesn't want to abide by the license, they can pay for ESRI instead.
Because old-style Google Maps (Score:5, Interesting)
RouteBuilder gives access to old-style Google Maps, which everybody loved, and impedes Google's forced migration to new-style Google Maps, which everybody hates [slashdot.org].
Re:Because old-style Google Maps (Score:4, Insightful)
I was wondering then this comment would come up, didn't take long. The new google maps interface is pure shit. It is literally fucking worthless to me on any trip with more than one stop. I am now planning routes on my Garmin, shit touch screen and all. This seems to be SOP at Google now: create something great, then shit all over it. I guess I should spin up my own webmail again on the expectation that they will break gmail soon
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I moved off of gmail a while ago and went to outlook.com. I have to say that the interface is much cleaner than gmail and it loads faster.
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Are you sure about that?
http://www.esri.com/ [esri.com]
Re:because (Score:4, Insightful)
The better headline would be "Website gets a free ride for ten years and now bitches"
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THIS!
More to the point, people who are accustomed to "free" always bitch when it becomes "Non-free". Okay, almost always. First hit is free kid, after you're hooked, you'll owe me your life.
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That was what I thought...just like what apple would do really.
Re:OSM (Score:4, Informative)
talk is cheap (Score:2)
That's a pretty lame excuse, nearly all the google maps competitors cloned the google maps JavaScript API for their services, and the differences are often minor enough that you can write a simple wrapper to handle it.
And that *you* I quoted in bold does not include *you* (yes, you, the poster). Otherwise, you would be doing it yourself. If you cannot or do not want to, for whatever reason, would that also be a "lame excuse"? As Torvald once said, talk is cheap, show me the code.
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and give the finger to google.
Because porting a stable and working project takes no time or energy...
Re: just use openstreetmap... (Score:2, Insightful)
But the bonus is a good lesson: Don't use Google stuff. At all.
Re: just use openstreetmap... (Score:3)
Don't build any software on top of a 3rd party library unless it's open source or you have a permanent, non revocable license. Failing that, have a contingency plan for when they shut you off. This advice goes quadruple if planning top build a business off said software
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Don't build any software on top of a 3rd party library unless it's open source or you have a permanent, non revocable license. Failing that, have a contingency plan for when they shut you off. This advice goes quadruple if planning top build a business off said software
Now this I totally agree with. When your business or project is totally dependent on the behavior of someone else, it is not "your" business or project. Not totally anyway...
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Yeah, because Google certainly isn't in the news on a monthly basis for randomly dropping or changing something they've provided and which people like and relied upon for years, for no apparent reason. Google is extremely unreliable in that regard, and even if it is their right to be that way, which it is, the recommendation to not rely on their services for something like RouteBuilder is a good one.
OpenStreetMap (Score:2, Informative)
I don't see why that site needs Google Maps specifically. Just exchange it for other service. OpenStreetMap is free and tiles are available by a couple different providers. There are others, such as Bing Maps and HERE Maps, but I have no idea about their TOS.
Too big for 14 days of one person's spare time (Score:5, Informative)
One option for me would be to rewrite routebuilder to run on another mapping platform, but with an infant at home and a full-time job, I frankly don’t have the time or energy.
I don't see why that site needs Google Maps specifically. Just exchange it for other service.
Because you, Anonymous Coward, haven't offered your services to port it within 14 days. Also because I'm the wrong person for the job at the moment, having never written a line of OSM code.
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That's a nice sounding ideology but the reality is that even if you start with a good 100% accurate street map, chances are you'll never be able to keep up with the updates on your own as governments build and change roads. That's of course, assuming you even have the resources to create one to begin with.
Since this is a one man operation, I really doubt your suggestion is at all practical.
Re:Important 3rd party API lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
Governments should provide these in a open standard format, to the public for free. (they must or should have this information already) This should include speed limits, (permanent and temporary) they should have this information, taxes where used to make these roads, knowing how to use these roads to get from one place to another legally should be a public right.
If they are selling this information to companies, in order that they can sell it back to us, is just wrong.
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And anyone who has ever done GIS like I have knows that the old Tiger line data was notoriously incomplete and highly inaccurate for the roads that are in it.
That is just a reimplementation of the old data which is just as incomplete and inaccurate.
Re: Important 3rd party API lesson (Score:3)
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Governments should provide these in a open standard format, to the public for free.
They provide information; it's not all in a standard format and freely available in convenient form.
If they are selling this information to companies, in order that they can sell it back to us, is just wrong.
I suspect companies are able to arrange for copies of data through records requests, involving the company paying, and they do the work of disseminating, aggregating, and translating the information to standard
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For a start the government doesn't actually have the data that you are talking about. They have a lot of data, but a lot of it is out of date or inaccurate for a huge number of reasons. Also roads are quite often not built by government or funded by tax payers. Any large scale land development will include myriad roads and other services that are built by the developer. The developer submits the plans of those roads to local government but those plans often don't match what is on the ground.
Google has c
Re:Important 3rd party API lesson (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a nice sounding ideology but the reality is that even if you start with a good 100% accurate street map, chances are you'll never be able to keep up with the updates on your own as governments build and change roads. That's of course, assuming you even have the resources to create one to begin with.
Since this is a one man operation, I really doubt your suggestion is at all practical.
"Always have a backup plan" is not the same as "don't use third party software". I work for a company that uses google for our maps. We can also switch over to an alternative api with a click of a button. We do it occasionally for testing and I believe there might have been a problem 4-5 years ago where we ran the alternate for certain failover conditions but for the most part it has never been activated on our live servers but it's there just in case. We also use several commercial apis and on several occasions have switched vendors and then switched back for pricing reasons. Not only does this protect us from cases where the third party is no longer available but it also helps with pricing negotiations as even if we prefer one vendor over another they know that if they try to raise our rates that we are not locked into their platform.
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How is routemaker duplicating google maps? I can't get any turn-by-turn directions or anything similar to google maps. Routemaker just allows you to specify a route by clicking on various intermediate points and then saving/sharing that route with others.
Finding some minor flaw to shut down a service is definitely e
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One possible backup plan is to have an "alternate access method" pre-coded that Scrapes the provider's website, preferably in a manner that is either disruptive or less-efficient usage of the provider's resources than their API and does it in a manner that they will not be able to block the access.
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Yes, if you plan to do that you should consider that and prevent them from identifying your requests. Perhaps accessing it via Tor?
They don't have a right - Estoppel and Antitrust (Score:1)
Google has a right to restrict people however they want with their APIs. This site, although useful, can clearly serve as an alternative to Google maps, unlike e.g. flightradar24 where the map is not the core functionality of the site. I am on Google's side in this conflict.
No, they have a *contract* with someone who has agreed to their TOS. But there is also a principle in law called "estoppel," where someone else relies on your act or omission to your benefit or there detriment and therefore you are prevented from doing thing X that is inconsistent with that act or omission historically; like you can't cancel their map API access after using it to spread goodwill around google maps for a decade. You ALSO have antitrust issues--this app is arguably a lot more than Google ma
Smallest violin (Score:5, Interesting)
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They can still use Openstreetmap, the license doesn't preclude commercial use.
Re: Smallest violin (Score:1)
This is the problem with the "cloud" (Score:1)
And why I avoid it. When you rely on third parties you have to play by there rules and often people jump onto a single third party for a variety of reasons. Mostly because there is some social or financial benefit. Examples: eBay (more people equal more sales/faster sales/etc) or Facebook (obviously if you want to chat with everyone you know in the real world multiple platforms doesn't work terribly well). We could avoid these one provider problems by developing decentralized systems where each cog in the m
For deep thinking about the "cloud": Dilbert (Score:2)
This one is a classic. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you build on somebody's platform, it's more or less expected that this sort of thing can happen. So long as you fill a niche that they cannot or don't wish to, you are an asset, you make their platform better vs. the competition, as long as you don't do anything blatantly abusive or system-breaking, any little TOS details clearly don't forbid whatever you are doing. You might even get called onstage during some CES demo or given favorable marketing placement.
If your thing is either deemed a threat to the platform(as with Netscape's 'reduce windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers' trash talking) or now overlaps with a feature that the platform owner wishes to add to their offerings; well, maybe you get acquired(as SoundJam MP became iTunes), maybe you'll just get squished. Happens every time.
Laches (Score:1)
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The person invoking laches is asserting that an opposing party has "slept on its rights," and that, as a result of this delay, circumstances have changed, witnesses and/or evidence may have been lost or no longer available, etc., such that it is no longer a just resolution to grant the plaintiff's claim
This probably works in cases of copyright infringement or even in cases where you're claiming damages but I doubt it will work well when you're actively consuming their resources. To encourage people to visit, Mcdonalds could give a free coffee to everyone that comes in their restaurant for 10 years but that doesn't obligate them to continue to provide that free coffee indefinitely in the future. Likewise, I could allow you to come pick apples off my tree for 10 years but assuming that it's clear that I o
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This probably works in cases of copyright infringement or even in cases where you're claiming damages but I doubt it will work well when you're actively consuming their resources.
The problem is to invoke Laches, you need to be the defendant in a civil case.
Sounds like Google is just deactivating their API access within 14 days: not filing a lawsuit against them.
Google has no obligation to contract with them to provide services, unless of course, they have a claim of an antitrust violation of some
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Google isn't suing for an "equitable remedy", in other words, money. Google's just denying them access to the API they've been using. Laches doesn't mean you have to keep providing a given service eternally because some people have become dependent on it.
Estoppel? (Score:1)
They haven't complained for ten years? IANAL but I'd say it's too late to complain now.
But that'll be for the courts to decide.
How will they know? (Score:2)
RouteBuilder does not have a commercial licence (Score:5, Informative)
RouteBuilder is not Open Source, the site says:
Q: I'm building a website that would benefit from some of the features of RouteBuilder. Will you give me the source code for free?
A: I'm sorry, I'm not interested in giving away the source code behind this website for free. However, I am open to selling a license to use it.
Free use of Google Maps in applications comes with limits on how you can use it, and how many times you can hit the Google server for free. More than likely RouteBuilder exceeded these limits and Google asked RouteBuilder to purchase a licence, which they declined to do.
This is not news.
Re: RouteBuilder does not have a commercial licenc (Score:1)
They probably didn't exceed usage, Google tells you to have the client make the requests to their API. Each client, can make something like 2,500 requests per day to the gmaps api at zero cost to the website owner. There are a select few types of applications where that configuration isn't sufficient.
This is likely due to storage. I'd guess they're storing the lat/lon for too long and that's what's violating their ToS. 10 years could be so much "pilfered" lat/lon data without a business (permissive) license
we are the new microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
Google has been tilting toward evil ever since Facebook passed it in views back in 2010 and at that moment everything we had done before became no good.
"You couldn't even beat Facebook"
It was great a place to work up until that day.
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Google has been tilting toward evil ever since Facebook passed it in views back in 2010 and at that moment everything we had done before became no good.
"You couldn't even beat Facebook"
It was great a place to work up until that day.
Seems Google's still a relatively good place to work:
http://fortune.com/best-compan... [fortune.com] (puts them in first place)
http://uk.businessinsider.com/... [businessinsider.com] (puts them in second place behind Facebook)
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I said then, and many times since then, that building a business totally reliant on some other service's "free" API is a huge mistake and a recipe for disaster.
It could be. Twitter has cut off apps such as Meerkat [wikipedia.org] for being a competitor with future Twitter-owned services.
You can base a company off of providing a service on top of a Free Api, But you better be prepared to have a backup plan or a new plan on standby for the day that your access gets cut off.
The Maps API TOS is draconian (Score:5, Interesting)
Open it up (Score:2)
The guy doesn't want to open it up, and doesn't have time to convert it to Openstreet Maps (according to posts here), so unless Google makes a concession, maybe the best thing is to clone the concept as something open source? The functionality doesn't sound too hard to imitate?
I would have suggested the original author open source it, but the FAQ makes it sound like he doesn't really want to.
Great Potential for a country song there (Score:2)
Just a little more evil....everyday!
Gonna steal you're idea's and never pay
We're just a little more evil since our founders went away.
Pot kettle black? (Score:2)
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Google/Oracle is about copyright. This is about contracts.
Well, dear Google, (Score:2)
I may not reimplement or duplicate your app. I state that my app will be closed in 24 hours after you demonstrate that your app with similar functionality 1) exists, 2) existed before my app (as I believe it's a necessary prerequisite to "reimplement or duplicate") and 3) was accessible for the public so it was possible for me to know beforehand that such app exists. Google Maps does not count since it has no functionality to facilitate the route building.
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ToS violation is just a pretext for shutting down their app expeditiously; they can still shutdown the API access without a literal ToS violation, as it's within Google's discretion, so it probably doesn't really matter.
The ToS violation is just a way for Google to save face, I guess; if they want to kill the app they'll kill it either way.
"Don't be evil" (Score:1)
What is the violation? (Score:2)
I briefly looked at routebuilder.org and, as far as I can tell, it uses Google Maps itself, not some "wrapped" replacement of it. It just seems to tell you how long some segments are, which appear to all be drawn using the API.
I admit that I am probably missing something but at first appearance, there isn't anything here which violates Google Maps TOS.
This makes me wonder if most things that use Google Maps, may be unwittingly and obscurely violating the ToS in some way that only lawyers, but no developer
Bill Cosby (Score:1)
Google is a ... (Score:1)
Response from Google Maps API team (Score:1)
Hi everyone, Google Product Manager for Maps APIs here. We are not revoking Routebuilder’s access to the Maps API. Unfortunately, we mistakenly sent a letter to Routebuilder saying that they were in violation of the Google Maps API terms of service. This was an error. Once the developer contacted us about this issue, we replied apologizing for the misunderstanding and confirming that we would not be revoking his access to the Maps API. (He contacted us on Friday, we replied on Monday, the blog post wa
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why is parent modded down? Maybe by someone ignoring the legal sense of Laches?
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Laches is a defense in a lawsuit. There's no lawsuit here.
Laches (Score:3)
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It sounds like Google's not suing them, however, so Laches would be a defense in court, but it won't help them.
Google can still cite the ToS and shut off their access to the API.
Then it would be up to RouteBuilder to file the lawsuit, if they think there is a legal reason Google cannot block their usage.
Or (more productively), they'll find another source for the data that the Google Maps API exposes.
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Difference between a web services API when the web service is the service provider; the service provider governs the use of the API to access their service.
This is different from claiming copyright ownership on an API itself.
If a developer were using the API, AND they had modified the client to not use Google.com resources, then Google would have no ToS violation claim.