Liberating your My Maps data

Hi John,

You can create vector data from Google Maps, via My Maps for example or a Maps API application, but this must not be for the bulk creation of data. From the terms of service..

“Also, you may not use Google Maps in a manner which gives you or any other person access to mass downloads or bulk feeds of numerical latitude and longitude coordinates.”

ed

So, Ed, what about Google MapMaker data?

So it all comes down to the definition of “mass downloads or bulk feeds”.

I guess this means that me tracing my 6 hour walk and exporting that (I do actually do this), and then re-licensing it as a walking route is ok.

But systematically tracing every single road and re-licensing that (in the way that OSM contributors might do) is out.

Still a bit vague though – what if a large number of people individually trace their walks and share them, and then someone aggregates them all together to produce a map?

And is there a difference between tracing the map tiles vs the satellite tiles? What about if I upload my GPS trace to My Maps, and then adjust it slightly using the satellite photography (eg to improve bits where the signal was weak). Does that add any restrictions?

It’s decidedly murky.

Can’t Google just acquire the satellite photography companies that you’ve licences from?

I guess I wasn’t clear before…

So, Ed, what about liberating Google MapMaker data?

@Richard,

Indeed the limitations of real time micro blogging

About Mash-ups I fundamentally disagree Google makes no claims over the ownership of your data (unlike some others) and you are free to use KML data in whatever way you wish, not just in Google properties.

I can’t comment of Yahoo’s rational or approach to licensing data, or I can do is try to explain why Open Street Map is currently unable to use imagery from within Google sites in the same way.

John,

I don’t know the details but does wikitude,me allow people to export all the users contributions for use outside of their AR application, which i Love BTW !!

Apart from the discussion about rights I think there is a more direct issue for the Data Liberation guys in how data is exported from Google Maps. It comes out as a network link which means that the actual data cannot be saved onto a local drive unless:
- you’re prepared to tediously copy KML features one by one to the places column
- you’re techie enough to know how to grab the kml from the network link

An option allowing export as non network link as well as a network link would be much more open and, if I remember correctly, Google Maps used to only offer a none network link export.

At one end of the spectrum you have “Google makes no claims over the ownership of your data”. At the other you have an absolute prohibition on “mass downloads or bulk feeds”.

So there’s a dividing line somewhere, between ‘standard’ mash-ups and mass downloads. The problem is that Google has never said where this line is.

This actually isn’t an OpenStreetMap-specific question. When I referred to the SoC Summer School in the OpenGeoData posting, I was attending the event for my employer (WW Magazines), not as an OSM contributor.

One of our magazines is a 4×4 off-road driving magazine, and without giving too much away, we’re thinking of doing some off-road webmapping with a small crowdsourcing element: click on this ford or this incline to rate it, that sort of thing. Should work brilliantly with aerial photography.

But I can’t recommend to our company that we do it with the Google Maps API, because there is so little clarity about what’s allowed and where the IP will lie. It might be ok with 50 fords. But 100? 1000? What happens if I want to take it out of Google Maps entirely, and mash it up with OSM vector data (and, ahem, here there may be some connection to the live renderer I’ve been working on)? OSM’s licence is ok with that (it’s a Collective Work), but I honestly couldn’t tell you if Google’s is. What if we want to use the information in the printed ‘roadbooks’ we feature in the magazine? We can’t print 10,000 magazines then pulp them due to a copyright infringement.

There is, as yet, no answer on this. That’s why the Moderator request says “Sort the legalities” – not simply “Give OpenStreetMap permission”.

That said:

I do think that you will do much, much better by opening it up fully, and no doubt so do the (quickly checks) 992 others who’ve voted for the request. Yahoo have benefited directly from the OSM arrangement, with a whole host of good, free maps for Flickr. Most OSMers I know would love Google to use some OSM data, and ODbL means that yes, we are getting our legal act in order. It would be great if you were to do the same!

Ed you seem to be dodging our questions rather than answering them.

If Richard uses a Google map API to collect 1000000s of points and then decides to place these markers on printed maps using OSM tiles would this be an allowed use under current Google T&Cs?

Could he also print out the lat/lon of those points in his magazine as well?

And could you please answer my question about MapMaker, I’m not asking about the complete data set, just if I made any personal submissions.

One clarification on the “View in Google Earth” link – if you use that and expect the file to contain the actual data of the My Map – it doesn’t. It’s simply a link to tell Google Earth where to download the data from the GMaps server (designed so GEarth picks up changes to the My Map automatically – a useful feature in itself)

How to get a KML file containing the actual data:
http://sites.google.com/site/gmapstips/export-my-map-as-kml

Tim,

Nice idea, although as I have pointed out there would be no issue in derived data from that application.

I guess using GPS would be just like the old days for many OpenStreetMappers

Reading through this thread I feel I need to make a stand for the aerial suppliers (I’m not one of them).

If Google were to buy & grant the rights to aerials as some people suggest, I fear the excitment would be short-lived, even if you reserve up-to-date imagery as a high-end niche market.

The aerial industry is already suffering from tight margins and can’t be doing much better than just about breaking even. For them to offer their imagery to Google et al was already a great leap. It was no doubt lucrative for the suppliers in the short term but they must have been lying awake at night worried about substitution risk. Still, the whole industry and the public have benefited, which is great.

One more such leap however, giving away virtually all rights, would commoditise aerials even more and possibly result in suppliers falling off the cliff altogether. Unless we are happy to stick with 2009 imagery forever, Google and Microsoft would then have to step in themselves and take over aerial capture, monopolising the market. I’m not sure that would benefit anyone in the long-term – history shows that market choice and competition is always better than the reverse.

The alternative is of course to just “do it” as some people suggest and see what happens, and new opportunities will always work out. This is often true and seems to be the businsess development model favoured by the 2.0 world.

But sometimes I wonder whether the costly realities of buying/hiring aeroplanes, fuelling and maintaining them, and having qualified survey pilots flying them, are sometimes overlooked in the debate.

Your friendly paleo reseller, Thierry

@Steve,

Thanks for the Business Development ideas, if we are able to grant the rights you need, don’t worry you will be the first to hear. You could also try this two additional ideas..

- Ask Yahoo to buy more up to date imagery, as they appear to have the rights to grant you what you need.
- Cloudmade could buy the imagery with the appropriate rights for use by the OSM Community

As TG points out capturing imagery for millions of square kilometres is not an easy job and it does not come cheap, it will according to the analysts be worth a billion dollars next year, even for Google that is a lot of money

Ok, my last comment on this post as I think we’re increasingly repeating ourselves. Let’s forget OSM exists for the duration of this comment as it’s just clouding the issue.

There are two places where that sentence isn’t clear:

a) It does not define “mass” or “bulk” (my point above)
b) The Google Maps Terms applies it to ‘Map Information’ and the Maps API Terms to ‘Content’. UK and US case law is clear that derivations from aerial photography are not ‘Content’ or part of the ‘Map’

Google (on an official site) could do the minimum required to answer the request by:

1) Answering a) by publishing the quantitative/qualitative criteria in use
2) Answering b) by confirming whether or not the terms apply to derivations from aerial photography
3) Listing any further restrictions that apply to data created in this way

Anything over and above this would no doubt be warmly welcomed. As your issues with the OS demonstrate, and the comments over on James Fee’s blog by trad GIS guys confirm, derived geodata is a live issue for many people.

I’m sure the Data Liberation Front expect some resistance from product teams. There wouldn’t be much point to it if they didn’t. It’s to be applauded that Google have created an organisation to challenge this resistance, and I look forward to hearing from them.

I think “Fair use” is one of the worst terms to ever get written in to contracts. I wonder if it was infiltrated into society by contract lawayers to generate business for themselves as its ambiguity and openness to interpretation is huge .

Mobile phone and broadband contracts are often sold as “unlimited” with a fair usage policy (so not in fact unlimited!). The fair usage policy seems to be a threshold (e.g. downloading more than 10Gb a month) after which the customer is warned, advised to changed to a different tariff, or perhaps cut-off. It’s handy if the threshold/limit is published so you can see what the “unlimited” deal actually is.

Google must have a threshold set in the system somewhere that triggers at least an investigation into a user’s activities, even if it doesn’t do anything else automatically. What is this “alert” threshold? How many times can you download more than the threshold? Does a user get let off with a warning the first time? Etc etc…

I like the idea of fair use policies but in practice I think they cause more trouble than they’re worth. Everybody’s definition of “fair” is different for one thing. Is it OK if I decide that bulk means 2 billion plus records, and that what I’m doing is fair? If Google decides what’s fair, what rules does Google use? Or is it just made up on a case by case basis?

Part of the problem does lie with the particular data in question. A dataset of capital cities will be much smaller than a dataset of street lights. Would downloading the entire capital city dataset (or 90%?, 80%?) count as a bulk download? Say there were 1000 capital cities and you downloaded 1000 street light records from a dataset containing a million records, does this count as a bulk download?

If Google is not prepared to put actual figures on things, perhps would help if they published some case study examples on what is and is not fair use.

Ed I’ve been pondering over your comment how this is about OSM and that just isn’t true and in fact you are skewing things out of context, at least on some points.

One of the points of contention is if you use a gMaps API to collect information you then seem to be always locked into using gMaps API to display or show the information that was collected, otherwise you may fall foul of the derived information/bulk downloading issue.

wikitude.me allows a large number of points to be downloaded at a time through their AR viewer, is this bulk downloading?
If it isn’t, what exactly is bulk downloading?

Ed, but if I was collecting the information via gMpas it isn’t entirely my IP because I can’t just do what ever I like with it, I can’t publish an entire list in a magazine I can’t offer a KML file with all the points I can only serve a partial list online it would seem.

Ed, we’re not talking about making maps of every road it’s blatently obvious that this is not an acceptable use.

What we are talking about is points of interest, like wikitude.me collects, and how that information can be redistributed.

Ed, I was trying to make an analogy over what they are doing, but the question comes back to what is bulk downloading, if they offered a KML file of all their locations is that ok or not?

Basically where is the line between bulk downloading and not bulk downloading?

Ed,

From your description, if I use Google’s tiles and/or StreetView to collect data (let’s say by tracing the roads with satellite and naming my traces with the street layer) for all of the streets in my neighborhood, then post that somewhere online with a CC-BY-SA license. It’s my data, right?

Afterwords, someone in the city next to me does a Google search for my neighborhood, finds the data file, and adds their streets to the data file. Repeat ad infinitum.

Is that systematic (and thus against the ToU for Google)? At what point did it become systematic and not just regular people collecting their own data? When 3 people collected data? When the data was posted for public consumption? When they started building up a large data file?

(By the way, thanks for spending on this conversation. I think it’s at least an interesting topic, if not very important.)

Ed,

The explanation is still a bit confusing to me.

I have a simple example that will help clarify the ideas involved.

There is a site in Argentina that collects POIs. It’s very simple: you click on a Google map or satellite image (using the Google Maps api, of course) and create a new POI, which you then tag.

The very home page of this site explains that all POIs are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

There is also a way to download all the POIs in the site.

I understand by your comments that they own these POIs which they are licensing under a license compatible with OSM.

Is bulk uploading all these POIs to OSM a violation of Google ToS?

Sorry I forgot to mention the site in my previous post. It is http://flof.com.ar/

By the way you were right guessing the number of POIs: about 15000.

[...] sure Google will now want to release this data due to popular support given their own want to know “… why do they [Transport for London] make it so difficult [...]

[...] sure Google will now want to release this data due to popular support given their own want to know “… why do they [Transport for London] make it so difficult [...]