On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 1:48 PM, Richard Fairhurst <rich...@systemed.net>wrote:
> > [1] I actually think Google is being depressingly smart on this. They > purposefully don't elucidate what you can and can't do. On the one hand, > they want people to build geo apps and create indexable geodata on the > Google Maps platform - even though some of this might well infringe their > data/imagery suppliers' copyright. On the other, they don't want anyone - > like OSM - to leverage their data to build their own platform. So they just > say nothing. It's best for their business that way. > > Another explanation for this ambiguity I heard while having lunch with some Geo Googlers a year or two ago: they know that the legality of databases of information (and especially geo data) is very ambiguous and no where near court-tested. They are very stand-offish about this sort of stuff (see e.g. Wikimapia) because they don't want to potentially lose a court battle, thus removing one of their strategic advantages (owning their own data).
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