Obviously, Google and others who have innovated in the space can set the terms of service as onerous or ambiguous as they want to. You can choose whether or not you want to invest in building something around someone else's products.
Don't like the TOS? Develop it yourself or use another product.
This has been shown viable time and again, with App Store rejections and the like. It is obviously high-risk but sometimes worthwhile.
See Feist v. Rural Telephone for more on this. The only reason application of Feist is generally limited in cases of online access is because we have a theory that accessing a publicly available database containing phone numbers is akin to accessing someone else's private property, and therefore they can dictate whatever they want under theories like trespass to chattels, whereas consulting a printed telephone book in your home is decidely not accessing the phone company's property.
This is a pernicious, subtle issue now that we're becoming so dependent on online access provided by someone else's servers instead of accessing printed documents that we possess in our homes. Possession is 9/10 of the law, as they say. We need to rethink how "possession" applies to digital resources.
Likewise, there are laws around how much access a private property owner must grant to members of the public, especially if that property owner is running a business that is generally accessible to the public. Private property owners are allowed to declare some people trespassers, but each jurisdiction has different laws surrounding what the public can do on private property and when a trespass is allowable. For example, California's state constitution guarantees the right to hold reasonable protests in private shopping centers that are generally accessible to the public, whether the property owner likes it or not.
No one is saying there is a requirement for another business "to help invest" in any other; there may be requirements not to interfere with someone else's business by attempting to block what is otherwise public and freely available access to non-copyrightable information.
IANAL.
Routebuilder is fortunate that OpenStreetMap has collected much of the same data and that they can just code against a different API and continue to operate.
Mapping data is not "non-copyrightable information".
Open-source projects have a history of being hyper-sensitive to these concerns so that they never have to waste time with lawyers lobbing IP claims. A certain distribution derived from the sources released by a prominent North American enterprise Linux vendor comes to mind, as does WINE's refusal to accept any code from anyone who has any relationship with or connection to Microsoft whatsoever.
OpenStreetMap needs to be useful for everyone, not just people in jurisdictions with more liberal copyright laws.
How could a project like OSM make sure that it didn't happen on a large, clearly violating scale (because many people make copies of small parts, recreating the larger, protected work), especially if it isn't established what an internationally safe standard is.
In practice, you are right, you can copy a single street from google maps to OSM. I bet some mappers in the history of OSM have traced screenshots of google maps or something. But that is only safe because it can't be proven, unless you are unlucky enough to copy a canary.
As far as I know, Google Maps is protected from scripts copying the data points out only by its Terms of Use, which the CFAA basically eval()s into law.
Google Maps won't disappear overnight because they do provide a substantial amount of beneficial proprietary data, like the illustrations and private aerial/satellite imagery (imagery from sources like NASA is public domain), their scripts that allow easy embedding, the ability to connect to one's Google account, and so forth. But there is no legal protection of the raw data points used to build Google Maps as far as I know.
Let me reiterate that I'm not a lawyer and no one should do anything based on my posts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/prot-databases...
They aren't, but most businesses are regulated to prevent them from screwing your business.
If were renting a property for my burger stand a fast food giant could not buy the property and evict me without notice.
Common carriers from shippers to telecoms are regulated. Banks and lending are regulated too. Many businesses are regulated. Sure it slows things down, but it also creates stability.
I do not know what fair API use looks like, but some kind of regulation seems likely. Likely the kind of thing in the article will fall into grey areas.
The simple reality is that Google can control in any way shape or form how their API is consumed. Like I said, if you don't like that, don't build your business on the API. You do not have a right to anyone's API, regardless of how important the data is to your pet project or unicorn idea.
This same argument comes up when the Twitter API consumers get all up in arms because the business they built solely on top of Twitter's platform is all the sudden deemed irrelevant because of API access changes or terms of service changes. Tough tootles! And guess what, your API scraping twitter feed re-display iOS app is not innovation!
I personally think that "free APIs" are great, but if you don't have it in your business plan to share a portion of your revenue with external API data providers when they eventually ask, then you are going to get yourself in the position that the OP did.
Why not ? Plenty of financial APIs are regulated (and beyond horrible). The government has decided that anyone with a banking license and a certain amount of money stored at the central bank can use them. And God help you if you try to use the international APIs, they are so incredibly incredibly horrible.
Without this plenty of financial services wouldn't exist, no way would smaller banks be able to operate. Despite how badly designed it all is, without a doubt it is a very good thing that these APIs exist and are regulated.
Maybe regulation of APIs is exactly what we need. Hell, maybe we can even learn from the mistakes in financial APIs first and then regulate these APIs.
> if you don't like that, don't build your business on the API.
Are an impediment to progress when applied unilaterally as you are doing.