I can see a certain logic in the argument that UK citizens should have a right to certain map data, but Google is a commercial organisation and should have to pay for it. After all, Google will benefit from increased ad revenues by using OS data to attract people to its services.

Good quality mapping doesn’t come cheap. Expensive things that are given away don’t automatically become cheap to produce. The costs are just recouped elsewhere (or other services are compromised).

On another (but related) topic. Bing maps now serves OS 1:25,000 and 50:000 raster mapping. Is Google going to do this anytime soon? Bing is not much use to a Mac user as I can’t use it’s import kml functions. But if Google were to serve 1:25,000 mapping I’d be very happy!

Ed, I can see where you are coming from, but to get back to your original theme commenting on the OS, if the above is the nature of geodata then there’s no debate and no news about the OS being either open or closed.

Geodata is not like music or video, which are original works. It is the surface of the Earth upon which we walk and live. If the visible surface of the Earth is not in the public domain, nothing is. The outcry led by the Guardian over a closed OS arose because it was time to end the privatisation of what many feel is fundamentally public domain data.

For that matter, music or video that are streamed freely onto the public web abandon their claim to privacy and to control usage. In contrast, buying content from the iTunes Store is a clearly commecial transaction, as is the private purchase of commercial satellite data from a variety of commercial sites. That is very different from Google’s public web sites. There are many forms of content on the public web, but to date the touchstone for an open, public web is that what you put on that public web may be used by any visitor. Put a video on YouTube and you have no expectation of regulating who may look at it, what viewer they may use to view it or with whom or how they may share that video.

That relates to what is going on with the OS because we do not know as yet what this OS initiative will be. One hears reports that OS in private are citing Google as a motivation for some aspects of what they might do. Given Google’s footprint I believe those reports. If they say that providing data in public whilst claiming control over usage and derivative works, perhaps popping up in the future to lay claim upon any cartographic product created anywhere in the UK, as has been done in the past, that would be a negative outcome.

I would also remind all that the massive state financial underwriting of space activities is a legitimate aspect of the public policy debate in this matter of privatisation of public resources, either by OS or by Google or Google contractors. When the state pays the piper it should have a role in calling the tune. Any talk of “commercial data suppliers” absent recognition that the funds they pay for launches and other space services do not come remotely close to covering the fully loaded investment costs of that infrastructure they leverage and the services they consume is to uncritically accept another form of creeping privatisation.

Google, of course, can bypass that debate. Develop your own space science, design your own space vehicles, build your own launch sites, fly your own missions and pay for your own downlinks. And then sell the product using a private mechanism like the iTunes Store. To use the catch phrase that has emerged in this thread, there’s no obstacle to that.. other than perhaps cost!

I appreciate your comments on this but i think we are expanding this discussion to areas beyond the orginal point.

I think it is useful to just clarify that geodata online is content that shares characteristics more closely to music or video than webpages. With a few notable exceptions almost all the data behind the popular online mapping sites comes from commercial data suppliers who license data at some significant cost to the operators of such sites. Google does not pass on these licensing charges to users or api users and as a result have expanded the use of mapping by an order of magnitude.

“The connectivity behind our pipes regardless of how it is accessed is commercial bandwidth licensed by our company for very specific use via our specific applications and their usage guidelines only. The bandwidth is available in many other places and if the developers of Google or anything else would like to license it for their own use or to use it to make available to everyone a public web business there is nothing to stop them from doing so.. other than perhaps cost!”

Google wants to scan copyrighted library books for a Google business. The author could say,

“The intellectual property within my books regardless of how it is exposed is commercial content licensed by me for very specific use via specific rights granted and the applicable copyright law only. My books are available in many other places and if the developers of Google or anyone else would like to license them for their own use or to make them available to everyone for public viewing there is nothing to stop them from doing so.. other than perhaps cost! ”

It is a tangled web.

Ed, this is so full of rich irony as you generously pat the OS on the back for being more open with usage of public geospatial data while so ungenerously rejecting the notion that Google be open about the usage of geospatial data that Google itself chooses to flood onto the public web.

I agree that Google is very different than the OS. The OS never placed their content out on the public web. Google did.

The OS is also different from Google in that the OS has never claimed to be able to take other people’s commercial content, regardless of how it is exposed (to use your rather Orwellian phrase), and use it for itself, as Google does. If the OS had a commercial policy of harvesting other people’s commercial content and privatising the results, while at the same time the OS said you couldn’t harvest their public content for any purpose, we’d all call them hypocrites, wouldn’t we?

Whether my world view is different than yours is not really the issue here. It is that Google sets forth opposing world views at the same time. Your comments on the OS are a good example of that, as is your statement:

“The data behind Google earth regardless of how it is exposed is commercial content licensed by Google for very specific use via specific google applications and their api’s only. ”

Really? That is completely in opposition to Google’s own world view as expressed in the many efforts your company undertakes to secure Google’s own ability to use other people’s content for Google’s own purposes. That “regardless of how it is exposed” bit is especially evasive. What’s going on here is that Google is trying to develop a reputation for being open while being stiffly closed. That’s not right, and you should be called on that.

It’s also wrong that Google is trying to privatise public data. You are assisting in that by talking about how great it is that the OS has become open and by providing technical support to Google’s privatisation initiatives. Anyone who believes that the surface of the Earth is still in the public domain, that the OS being more open is a good thing and that public data should not be sold into private hands where a suitably stylish technologist can claim it is now ” commercial content licensed by Google for very specific use via specific google applications and their api’s only” should call you out for taking the wrong path.

For that matter, one of the things that has made the World Wide Web what is is has been the user community’s insistance that no one gets to privatise the public web, nor does anyone get to regulate how free people can choose to view that public web. Those of us in favor of an open Web have long rejected self-serving “terms of service” restrictions placed on public web sites – if you choose to take advantage of a free-born ability to stand up and speak your mind in the public square you don’t get to announce that all within earshot now owe you money for hearing your voice, or that you can control what they do with your words, or that they can only hear your words through an interpreter provided by you. Speak privately if that is what you seek.

That is why I cite your phrase “regardless of how it is exposed” as particularly Orwellian, because riding upon that phrase is Google’s Fifth Horseman of privatisation, saying that if Google muscle is behind the matter, even the public square now belongs to Google. Your phrase says it is not “lend me your ears” anymore, it is “your ears are now mine and I’ll be the one saying how you can use them.”

The OS got into trouble because even with the law on their side they attempted to privatise the world about us, the digital view of the world which ever more frequently defines our civic life. Google now seeks even more nakedly to privatise the public digital world we all have come to take for granted. If you hang out your “content” in the public square then darned right it matters “how it is exposed.”

I appreciate your personal willingness to allow opposing views in your blog. That tells me you are a good man who someday may help reform Google. If the OS can reform surely it is not too difficult for Google, either.