Mapping Hacks

“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” AJ Liebling

Jo Walsh, our co-author on Mapping Hacks, has never forgotten this. Sometimes it is annoying. I want to say “but look, you can do all this cool stuff with this free (but not open) API? Why struggle to reinvent the map widget?”

Why indeed? Because if you don’t control your tools you don’t control your own story. And if you don’t control your own story your creative acts are subject to the oversite of people whose motivations are not the same as yours.

When we were writing Google Maps Hacks karllohner+mappinghacks@gmail.comwrote the Perl module WebService::GoogleMaps. It was cool. With a tiny bit of code you could download a Google Maps tile. So I wrote a little demonstration script and put it on my server http://testingrange.com/cgi-bin/gmtile.cgi (now replaced with a rant) I then spent time and wrote up a hack for the book. At some point in there I mentioned it in one comment to a blog post on the Make Magazine blog.
No problem. The world is better off. Code exists in the world, thanks to Karl, and that code has a working example thanks to my much smaller bit of work, and a hack will exist in a published book that describes the code in more detail, and hopefully allows more people to have more options in how they tell their own stories.
No problem except that Google and their data ‘partners’ are in tenuous negotiations, and the idea that someone could do something with a map that was outside of what is permissible is, well, not permissible. So they rumble about and make noise at other people doing similar things, and rather than be annoying I went ahead and canned the hack. I didn’t think to take the code down, after all, no one knows about it, it just doesn’t matter, and frankly, I had forgotten about it.

Offering a slight amount of slack to Google, they arguably were making more data available than we had available before, and access to that data just had a few little limitations.

For a long time I even bought that line. But then October 1st, 2006, over 15 months later, I get a literal copy of the same ‘oh we are so sensitive to developers but take it down anyway’ letter that Google sent out a year ago to some other folks who had done something similar. So I’ve got a take down letter from Google. wOOt, I suppose.

The thing is, the letter uses the same language, the same argument, from 15 months ago, that my little code “jeopardizes our ability to make Google Maps available to the public because it encourage downloading of our copyrighted images and data.”

It isn’t us, they say, but that mean data provider, and if developers do interesting things that we don’t allow the data provider will pull the data. Oh. Really?

There was a period of a few weeks, maybe months, where there were actual negotiations, and that line mattered. But now? Not so much. As for encouraging downloading?
Obviously that is bullshit. Every single use of Google Maps involves downloading their ‘copyrighted images and data.” I don’t have to get into the whole ‘how the web works’ screed. Google’s _whole business model_ is based on downloading other people’s copyrighted images and data, and doing things with that data that the original creator’s did not intend.

That is sort of the way innovation works. And isn’t it sweet that Google allows us to make Google Maps’s mashups with their copyrighted images and data? Sure. It is all great, until you want to do something outside of their rules.

Sure, they are quite open, especially compared to where we were, but they are also locked down. You can make maps with their data if you give them information about your site. Every time someone looks at a Google Maps mashup Google knows about it. So they know that people who read ’serialkiller.com’ spend their time zooming into aerial photography of desolute stretches of coast and desert.
But again, you have to play by their rules. And their rules, and their tool, has sucked the Oxygen out of the room. Why bother to work on free maps, we can just piggy back on Google. Why work on free maps? Because if you don’t have free maps you don’t get to control your own story, and someone who isn’t you gets to decide what you get to say, and how you get to say it.

Have a nice day.

Posted in licensing, collaborative mapping, data, community, mashup, public geodata, annoying_gits |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.