Playing dumb isn't an excuse. Can I stop paying my morgtage on my house because the 40 pages of documents I signed I don't 100% understand? No.
If you want to enter a legally binding contract that you don't understand you hire someone to help you do so, or face the consequences if you signed something you were not smart enough to be signing.
That's good advice, but I didn't sign anything here.
I have in the past signed contracts with companies agreeing to use services or software in certain ways (generally pre-release stuff under NDA), and in those cases I do indeed read the contract carefully before signing it, sometimes redlining parts of it before they countersign, and I abide by our mutually agreed result. If I don't feel I understand it, I refuse to sign, or ask for clarification.
However, to my knowledge, I have never signed a contract with Google. If they had asked me to do so, I would certainly have refused if I didn't understand the terms. But I do not believe they have even asked me to. All I have done is visit their website, just like they have visited my website.
I have a ToS on my own site, but as far as I can tell, Google just accesses my site however it wants and does not read it (they definitely don't pay me for the premium tier, despite exceeding the stated free access limits).
To use their API you will need to agree to their TOS
That webpage serves map tiles over HTTP, without asking me to agree to a contract first. I take it that I may therefore access the map tiles over HTTP? Obviously I assume I cannot redistribute them, as they're copyrighted. And it is good netiquette to observe robots.txt for bulk/crawl access. But beyond that I don't believe me visiting their page constitutes me "signing" a contract with Google, any more than Google visiting my page constitutes them "signing" a contract with me.
Perhaps there is some other API with nice JSON stuff and OAuth or whatever, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just doing HTTP GET requests for map tile URLs.
https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/help/terms_maps.html
and the first link there is the Google Universal Terms of Service that you also agree to bind yourself to:
It seems very similar in the sense to which Google "agreed" to pay me money if they spider my page more than N times/day, which is what my own website's terms say in the footer. Yet I've never received a check. Is Google playing dumb and claiming they never read the terms, so can't be held liable?
If so, looking at whatever data's on your wire (browsers are subclass of user-agents for a reason), and then doing similar requests by example does not make you sign some agreement with Google, right?
Nope.
More to the point -- regardless of the specifics of the law, the persistent desire of this forum to correlate legality to moral correctness is somewhat disturbing. What does it even mean to form an agreement with "Google"? Even assuming the historical basis of contract law, what constitutes "consideration" in an agreement like this?
Personally... I don't see any ethical reason to perform negotiations with organizations that have become as large and as disconnected as Google. I speak to employee after employee and they all speak of Google's commitment to privacy, to openness, to not doing evil; but the actions of Google at every turn display otherwise. A man can make an agreement with another man or perhaps even with an organization that is capable of coherent action, but Google is neither. No "agreement" with Google is valid if only because Google is not a collective that one can actually negotiate with, never mind that it's proven time and time again willing to discard agreements and promises in the name of profit.
Finally, the statement is often made that if one chooses not to consider Google as an entity with which one can negotiate, one should simply not utilize their resources. Why? Because we can't negotiate with a mountain, should we fail to mine the minerals therein? Google is a mound of computational power and data with no remaining hold on human morality or ethics -- anything we can retrieve from there is salvage. Take it and use for the betterment of humanity, because they certainly will not be doing so.
Playing dumb isn't an excuse; But if one were to juxtapose the consequences of ignoring google's wishes and not paying ones mortgage, that would seem ridiculous.
And is accessing a url is a legally binding contract now, especially when nothing is signed or acknowledged by one or both parties when the url is accessed?
This is in no way comparable to using a companies API.
And like blog posts written by people on various subjects, one might click the links, find something of value from accessing the link and decide to access it in an automated fashion without caring (Oh, it has api in the url! * doesn't think twice about it *) to bother to look for anything else because as far as they are concerned, they're getting what they need right there. Now if they run into rate limits and get blocked for x amount of time, its tough luck. But if one doesn't run into rate limits, and continue to uses such a link, should they expect the 2 am wake up call or expect to get kicked out of their home or face significant hardships in life because of it?
[0] http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?sensor=fals...
Now If it is 'malicious' enough for google to recognize the access, and trace down the source to get the DOJ to throw the book at the person/company, that is a different story that we have seen before…