Here is some interesting news that may impact developers using the Google Maps API (our Google Maps API profile). Google has recently made a couple of updates to their terms of service and have posted the the new terms of service here. There was an initial update made in early November, but one that lead to some debate and confusion about a couple of points, which in turn to a subsequent update. The net result is that the terms of service have been streamlined and some previous restrictions have been removed, including a restriction on the use of Google Maps in desktop applications. Here’s a summary of the changes:
The new Google Patent Search API is now available and lets you search over 7 million patents via code. It is part of the AJAX Search API suite of content-specific Google search utilities such as book search, government search, code search and others.
Here’s an interesting online business you may not have heard of: Betfair. Who are they? They’re the world’s leading online betting exchange, a concept they helped pioneer back in 2000, and now have annual revenues over 180 million pounds Sterling.
Developers know that it’s a good idea to carefully read the terms of service (ToS) for APIs you use. However, it’s all too easy to ignore a ToS as nothing more than legal boilerplate.
We recently added this new API listing to the US government site USAspending.govwhich provides API access to budget data, but we didn’t notice a detail which one of our readers did: that there’s this somewhat intimidating, red-text warning on the homepage.
For the third time in as many weeks a third-party Facebook application is the subject of controversy. This time around it’s that Hasbro, the company behind Scrabble, wants to shut down the popular Facebook app Scrabulous.
There was a bit of stir this week when the small music web site YottaMusic had to shut down because they were no longer allowed to use undocumented Rhapsody APIs.
Earlier this year in Beware Mashup Spam we saw how spammers were working on gaming Google Maps via mass uploads and creating questionable or false listings. Well, Search Engine Land’s Mike Blumenthal has just followed-up on his initial report with more in yesterday’s MapSpammers Getting More Sophisticated.
In a nutshell, Mike reports on get rich [...]
As you can see in our news archive under the topic “law” there are lots of unresolved questions when it comes to the legal issues around mashups and APIs. In an interesting session at yesterday’s MashupCamp Dublin many of these issues were discussed. Clare Dillon took good notes, here’s a brief summary:
What about terms and [...]
In a very lively forum thread over at Flickr there’s a discussion/debate about the Flickr API, data ownership, copyright, and mashups. In a nutshell, a Flickr member, Austen Haines, noticed that some of his photos were appearing in the mashup Adactio Elsewhere even though he had flagged them All Rights Reserved (ARR). The mashup developer, [...]
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