Re:Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
by TallGuyShort on Monday September 09, 2013 @10:51PM
(#6357848)
I think the point you make is an excellent one. However, we've seen court decisions that essentially equate ToS violations with wire fraud, no? I wonder where the line gets drawn...
Re:Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
by pyre on Monday September 09, 2013 @11:31PM
(#6358002)
> we've seen court decisions that essentially equate ToS violations with wire fraud, no?
I can only think of one, and it was overturned. Most of the others (that I can think of) have to do with an employee/employer relationship. Even the recent Craigslist case wasn't necessarily a case of ToS violation, because they were explicitly asked to C&D, but didn't.
Re:Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
by wslh on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @01:11AM
(#6358289)
And we've also seen antimonopoly actions against companies abusing their power position.
Re:Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
by mikeash on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @09:59AM
(#6360025)
My point is simply that the two are not at all equivalent. An open-source license grants additional rights to the person receiving the license, while terms of service restrict the person receiving it. As such, there is no inconsistency whatsoever with saying that one should not be automagically bound by such things just because they clicked through them or they happened to be sitting on a web site that you use. It doesn't matter at all if you violate the terms of an open source license. All that means is that you don't enjoy the additional rights granted to you by that license. You can still enjoy all of the rights granted to you by normal copyright, which means that you can use your copy and make additional copies in ways covered by fair use. If you go beyond that, you're violating copyright, and that is the fundamental problem, not violating the license. Violating the license is only a problem when you want to use some of it (e.g. the permission to distribute derived works) but not other parts of it (e.g. the requirement to distribute source code).
Violating a license isn't illegal, only violating copyright is. I don't think there's an equivalent for terms of service for a freely-available service.
The thing is, without that license, you're bound by copyright. That means you're not allowed to redistribute those files, or anything derived from them, at all without permission from the copyright holder, with the exception of uses allowed by fair use.
For source code and similar things, there's a default position which is highly restrictive, and the open source license loosens the restrictions. Nothing forces you to accept the license. It's just that you can do much less with the material if you don't.
Terms of Service are a completely different beast, because the default position is that you can use services that are mad public over the internet more or less however you feel like, as long as you don't violate copyright and such. The ToS then adds restrictions.