Hi, your assumption seems correct to me, but also leads to conclusion i think that they are against ToS
I will try to rephrase what i THINK "freely accessible" means to me 1) Your map must be accesible by ANYBODY who has web browser 2) If you want to protect your site by login and password, you MUST provide register option for anybody and FOR FREE 3) You cannot earn money by providing "higher level" of registering - Lets take this thought deeper. Lets think about "driving distance application" a. Driving distance calcullation for anybody = ok with ToS b. "Save start point" for registered user, for free = ok c. "Save end point" for "gold" user ... must be also for free to be ok with ToS Back to your ... lets say it "geocaching game" 1) Anybody must be able to register for free 2) MY OPINION: Anybody must be able to see AT LEAST SOME data on your map (e.g.: "Caches we found week ago") 3) MY OPINION: It is ok to have "gold user" accounts. Those accounts must be provided without any charges and to me, it would be fine to allow data access to anybody at time, when game ends Again: I am not a lawyer, those are my opinions and I can be really wrong On Oct 11, 10:13 pm, Jasper <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > Coming weekend there is a large game in which the goal is to find > moving targets. I am part of a group that will participate. Now I want > to write a Google Maps application that will have the game go smoother > for us. > However, we have competitors and they shouldn't be able to access the > information we have gathered. So there a password will have to come > into play. Now, I was wondering what I can and cannot do with a > password protection. The terms of service did give me a reasonable > picture, but I do still have some questions. > > If I understand everything correctly, I cannot simply add a .htaccess > file or similarly disallow access to anyone except those in my group. > > The obvious solution would be to have the application be available to > anyone, but restrict access to the data. This way the application is > freely accessible, but the database we store our findings in will only > be available to us. Am I correct to assume that this is allowed? > Of this solution there are two variants. First off, I could make the > system so that anyone can acquire an account, but only people from my > group will access our data. Instead, I could make the service work > without an account (thus sharing your data with the world if you use > it) or with an account, but only give out accounts to my group. Would > there be a difference between the two in whether or not the terms of > service allow it? > > Last of all comes the truly gray area (at least, I think so). The ToS > isn't very clear about it, but it would only seem logical to me to be > allowed to provide some extra functionality to registered users - even > if registration is not open to everyone. > For example, say you make a distance calculator - I would say it is > not against the terms to provide a "Save starting location" button for > users that are logged in, even if not just anybody can register. I > might be wrong about this all together, if so telling me that would be > sufficient, as my whole point is based in that assumption. However, if > my assumption is correct, it has some complex implications. > While the above seems reasonable in some cases, it can hardly be > executed with a set standard. While the above is an example of fairly > using that system, it isn't very hard to find cases in which it is > not. For example, I could make a website that merely includes a google > maps screen for anyone not logged in, while only providing my own > functionality to the few people I handed an account to. This then > seems completely unreasonable, but is build on the same principle. > Something that would seem at least somewhat reasonable, providing my > application to anyone with only one limitation: changes made will only > be saved by the browser, unless you are logged in, then they will be > stored in the database. Is this allowed? > > Thanks for reading my long question - and if you are going to respond, > thanks for your response. > > Jasper --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-api?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
