>However, to my knowledge, I have never signed a contract with Google.

To use their API you will need to agree to their TOS

https://developers.google.com/maps/licensing

I have never visited that page. I have visited this one: http://maps.google.com

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.

I think you're confusing accessing a public version of their data with accessing their API, which this thread is about. When you use maps.google.com you are NOT agreeing to any terms, because they don't really require any to use their data on their site, but when you use the API, you're required to agree to their terms before being able to use it.

FWIW, there's a "Terms" link at the bottom of maps.google.com which links to the additional ToS for Google Maps/Earth:

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:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/

In what sense did I "agree to bind [myself]" to those terms? I just loaded a public website that has map tiles on it. You are arguing that I have agreed, thereby, to something written on a different website (two clicks away), which I was neither presented, nor asked to agree to, nor signed an agreement 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?

Aren't the same exact APIs are serving as backend to that "public version"?

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?

> Aren't the same exact APIs are serving as backend to that "public version"?

Nope.

Just because their app consumes their API doesn't mean that the app and it's endusers are subject to the same terms as the API.