Just like buses on the high street in any town in the UK, you have to wait ages and then along come a bunch together, so it is with the Maps API TOS, which Google revised again today.
Clearly section 11 was an area of concern to the community, it is the section that balances legally what you as a map user submit and how Google may use your content. MIckey on the Geo Developers Blog gives an excellent explantion of the thinking behind the changes to this section.
I believe these changes improve the clarity of the TOS and will hopefully reduce the concerns expressed by some developers.
The new section 11 for reference is below…
11. Licenses from You to Google.
11.1 Content License. Google claims no ownership over Your Content, and You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Your Content. By submitting, posting or displaying Your Content in the Service, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute Your Content through the Service and as search results through Google Services. This license is solely for the purpose of enabling Google to operate the Service, to promote the Service (including through public presentations), and to index and serve such content as search results through Google Services. If you are unable or unwilling to provide such a license to Your Content, please see theFAQ for information on configuring your Maps API Implementation to opt out.
11.2 Brand Features License. You grant to Google a nontransferable, nonexclusive license during the Term to use Your Brand Features to advertise that you are using the Service.
11.3 Authority to Grant Licenses. You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above licenses.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Finally after an extended delay the Dept of Communities and Local Government has published the UK location strategy, Place matters. The blueprint for a UK Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), or an extended job application for someone in Southampton…
You decide !
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
From todays Pre-Budget report, a document that’s main focus is the fiscal stimulation of the UK economy, this nugget of potentially very exciting news…
“4.54 Re-use of public sector information from trading funds
The HM Treasury/Shareholder Executive assessment of trading funds has considered the potential for innovation and growth from increasing commercial and other use of public sector information. It will shortly publish some key principles for the re-use of this information, consider how these currently apply in each of the trading funds and how they might apply in the future, and the role of the Office of Public Sector Information in ensuring that Government policy is fully reflected in practice.
For the Ordnance Survey, this will involve consideration of its underlying business model. Further details will be announced in Budget 2009.”
In politics, timing is everything..
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
As the Whitehall farce that is the OS derived data debacle continues, it’s interesting to contrast the flow of public sector information in the UK with that in Australia which I have just experienced first hand at the first Asia Pacific Spatial Innovation Conference.
Interestingly for a Geospatial conference there was in addition to the usual technology developments, a theme looking at innovation in business models, funding and licensing. It’s not often there are as many economists at a geospatial conference as ESRI gurus !
For me the biggest take away was the increasing recognition by government here that data needs to be set free both at all levels of government, and there are I’m sure many important lessons which could be picked up in Europe and in the UK specifically.
Australia is more similar to the UK than the US, for example the value of information is recognised and information products are protected by copyright as is the case in the UK.
But in Australia, lead by the great example of Queensland, government data sets are starting to be released using Creative Commons licenses, and in a study presented by Tim Barker the Director of Queensland’s Spatial Information Office, 85% of the public sector data-sets they had examined could by licensed using one of the standard creative commons licenses without any problems.
Before you all fall about laughing saying this could never happen in the UK, the OS actually has released information under a creative commons license before, the research team published some ontologies used in semantic research using a non-commercial share alike licence, but of course perhaps that was a little under the radar screen.
Still we live in hope…
Written and submitted from the Qantas Lounge, Sydney AIrport, using its free 802.11 network.
