GMerge shut down by Google
Well, this is not exactly unexpected. Google appears to have shut down the Gmerge satellite-tile-assembling service I wrote about yesterday, as the assembled imagery is apparently outside the uses allowed by their terms of service.
I had a quick look at the Google Maps TOS yesterday, as the thought had occured to me that they might have some restrictions. It looks like making “copies” is out of bounds, although for an individual end user, the browser obviously needs to do at least a little copying. This is similar to a potential image licensing issue we encountered with the OpenPix image server a few years ago, which was also tile based.
I’d like to see Google leave end users the right to use the data for non-commercial applications, under the assumption that commercial users would generally prefer to actually pay for explicit data rights if there were a real need for it, and leaving the data available would alllow the discovery of interesting applications for the data, sort of like what’s going on with GMerge. Perhaps they should add a “Buy Now” button to the Google Maps interface for purchasing a license to use the displayed data.
Update 2005-06-08 17:24: Discussion on Slashdot
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