Gaia, which bills itself as “an attempt to reverse engineer famous Google Earth and implement its functionality in open, portable, customizable and extendable way,” recently published the cease and desist letter it received from Michael T. Jones, Chief Technologist for Google Earth.
Mr. Jones writes that he and his team “are concerned that you may not understand the developing global social impact of your engineering creativity.”
The letter does have some teeth though: “The kindness through which Google has made the wonder of our planet available to more than 100 million users around the world is now threatened — not by a menacing and fierce business competitor — but by you.”
But always includes compliments: “we remain hopeful that this
was an unintended result of what started as intellectual curiosity by a
smart engineer like ourselves who has a passion to learn how things work.”
Kudos to Google for taking the soft approach first – the Gaia founder clearly learned his lesson in his reply that “Data does not belong to Google, it is licensed under certain conditions, which include unability for third parties to access raw data. Be those conditions continuously broken, Google will no longer be permitted to use the data, so not just no more Gaia, but no more Google Earth. That’s absolutely not what I want, not I hope any of you want.”
This is a far cry from the days of Booble 😉
Via Waxy.
About the Author:
Garrett French will be covering the AMA’s MPlanet conference for MarketingShift and visiting with his cousin Mark Steven who recently received an excellence award from Walt Disney, which his grandfather video taped and he edited.
