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I think you misunderstand the economic meaning of "rival good": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)

True, but API's use hardware that has actual costs so it is a "rival good". For example, GPL code is a non "rival good" in that someone running it on their own hardware costs nothing, a download service that provides GPL code is a "rival good" in that a finite number of people can use it at one time.

Now if Google hosted their map's as a torrent and said, use this for whatever you want. That would be close enough that calling it a non rival good would be a reasonable defense. But, they do charge some customers for using their API which right or wrong opens them up to predatory pricing laws.

Yeah, rival-ness is not a binary value though. In a case where marginal costs of providing a service are very low, it's reasonable to describe it as being mostly non-rival.

> if Google hosted their map's as a torrent . . .

Then it would be non-excludable, which is a different concept from non-rival. It would be rival to the same degree as before, in that it would require marginal computing resources to use. Just the resources required would be coming from the user rather than the provider of the service.

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