Maps should be free. But I think it has to be argued.
Aside from a corporate sense of right and wrong as in "don't own the commons duh!" - is it even a money-maker to own the base data? What are the economic liabilities of having to own map data? What does it cost to have to constantly maintain, correct and be legally responsible for the accuracy of the base-maps? What is the cost of manufacturing enthusiast volunteer participation? What comes at a lower cost of investment via voluntary community collaboration? I'm so curious as to the purely pragmatic bean-counter fiscal arguments. I wonder how much of present policy is just un-thought and how much is conscious. Are there any way to measure intangibles? For example - by training people to be authors, by encouraging ownership and participation - you may foster a generation of citizens who may be invested in civic participation - who more deeply understand and care about our landscapes and who better understand the ferociously tangled complexity of land use. There could be a virtuous circle kind of effect going on - even more so than by allowing people to contribute to your proprietary dataset. When Jo Walsh first suggested community self-mapping a decade ago she did it with some derision - that it wasn't feasible. At the time it wasn't - we were not trained that way. We've become able to do it by bootstrapping ourselves. We became more able over time. Google (of all entities) wants completely unencumbered access to data - no holds barred. Geography is so crucial to human understanding - it's a definite signifier in human search. And there's no reason why they shouldn't have that. But even so it seems like "ownership" of map data in terms of re-licensing rights would be similar to having to own Wikipedia. It is a difficult position to want to be in. If you built your own Wikipedia it would do better against other Wikipedias based on the quality of content. In turn that would be based on the caliber of contributers. In turn those contributers decide who to contribute to based on the closest sense of right and wrong. To attract those voices( rather than having them go to a competitor ) I think you'd have to express the best values - to be the most free, the least conflicted, un-indentured to say advertisers or nation states. If say you are beholden to advertisers or the like - then your integrity and your data is suspect. Google already "has" Wikipedia in a sense - it's a featured search result - and I doubt there's any sentiment at Google that they need to own Wikipedia. Wikipedia presents as an independent resource that can fairly reflect frank truth and critical "objective neutral" assessments of Google, Google vested interests, advertisers, various nation states, governments and the like. Maps are similar. Consider this example of Google colliding with Ordnance Survey in the UK ( the folks whose medieval data policies got Steve Coast and OSM all excited in the first place to go and liberate maps ): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/article-1323119/Google-maps-master-plan-halted-Ordnance-Survey.html And look at this freaky map comparison posted here earlier by via Ilya Zverev http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=41.7292&lon=44.7735&zoom=13&layers=M http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&ll=41.711111,44.78817&spn=0.072659,0.129433&z=13 What a hassle. But as far as solutions... I think we have to step outside of our positions first of all. I've always liked Paulo Friere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Freire ) for his observation that both the oppressor and the oppressed are trapped within their roles. To me it empowers the oppressed to help solve the situation - to step above the fray and above their own needs - to not merely free themselves but to free both parties. Often the intractable positions have to be arrived at through parties who have degrees of freedom where their opponent does not. I also think it's worth having a talk with the specific individuals that set the corporate policy - perhaps at Where 2.0 ? Like; not just treat it as 'Google' but as specific policy setting guidelines of specific individuals. This has been a discussion that comes up from time to time - I remember a fairly lively debate about it at WhereCamp at Google a couple of years back in fact. It is ( as Rich just said ) something that keeps coming up in this community. It's not just 'Google' as an entity but the specific jobs of persons at Google to set goals and have lawyers write-up those goals. Who are those persons - why do they set those policies - how can we work with them to change those policies? [ As an aside it would be kind of funny if it was Ed Parsons who was also involved in having to defend these decisions again here :-). ] It's also worth putting a dollar value to this. For me it is a systems question. What is the optimal behavior of a set of organisms in an ecosystem? How do you help an organism change when it's behavior is short-sighted. How do you weigh systemic outcomes of decisions like data ownership policy? There's a diffuse value to "free" that may be larger than the concentrated value of "closed". There may even be more value in contributing to "free" than there is in continuing to be closed. It is just a longer term perspective and not always clear or easy to argue. Maybe the folks at CloudMade have some kind of rough estimate of the dollar value that OSM has contributed to businesses and personal interests around the world? If everybody who used CloudMade had had to buy Ordnance Survey data, or commercial data from other countries - how much would that have cost? Also - it's worth taking the point wider. Waze (who I worked for) also has a licensing policy that does allow free use of their data but excludes commercial use: http://www.waze.com/legal/tos/ . Also if you look at say FourSquare they've taken their venue data and tried to build an inter-corporation shared data repository: https://developer.foursquare.com/venues/ again however - same "you can kind of use it but it isn't really free" licensing policies. I'm such a fan of the BSD license : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses . It lets people take work that others did and make money off of it. It acknowledges that this is a basis for re-investment back into the base work - and it doesn't try to deny people from putting food on their table. It also suggests that ownership is ultimately a liability - not always an asset. BSD licensed code is the core of the Internet. I must admit I'm personally pretty tired of all of the caveats and provisos that people try to put around their data land grabs - instead of focusing on bigger possibilities that come from conjoining these digital ecosystems together... I'm happy to chair a session on this topic next week anyway if folks wish. a On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 10:15 AM, Tom Longson (nym) <[email protected]> wrote: > Excellent writeup, I had no idea. > > Cheers, > Tom Longson (nym) > ------------------------------ > http://tomlongson.com > > > > > On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 9:25 AM, Mr. Puneet Kishor <[email protected]> > wrote: >> On Apr 11, 2011, at 8:30 AM, Mikel Maron <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> http://brainoff.com/weblog/2011/04/11/1635 >> >> I'll make sure to ask Google later today about this at the "Law and the >> GeoWeb" workshop. >> >> >> >> == Mikel Maron == >> +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Geowanking mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Geowanking mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org > -- @anselm 415 215 4856 http://twitter.com/anselm _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
