The sticking point with this, as with most geo APIs which depend on non-free data, is the terms of use:
"The data in the API is our intellectual property or that of our partners who provided it to us. It is not yours and we are not granting you any broad license to use this data outside of the use of the API."
"You agree that you will not, and will not assist or enable others to:
a) cache, record, pre-fetch, or otherwise store any portion of the Company Content or attempt or provide a means to execute any "bulk download" operations;
...
j) make requests against the API that are not user initiated;"
As you might guess, the ownership over the data is a tricky issue, where there are many variables that aren't under our control. Our objective is to make the information as open as possible within these constraints. One thing to note, however, is that the userview portion (i.e. the data that an app WRITES to the API) does remain under the app's control (i.e. developers don't relinquish ownership). Over time, we do think there will be an opportunity to have developers contribute their improvements to a common pool of information to benefit everyone.
This is why I don't understand copyright law. Aren't data facts? Facts can't be copyrighted, right? Where a business is located is a fact. How can they say how someone else can use that fact?
Facts are not copyrighted, but a collection of facts as such may be copyrighted, assuming there is some creative activity involved in compiling the collection. So, a list of the most common English words would be copyrighted, since there is creative effort involved in deciding whether a word is common.
IANAL, but I think you're right. They really can't tell you what to do with public data even if they provided it to you, because as you said you can't copyright facts. Feist Publications vs. Rural Telephone Services is the most relevant case:
It gets hairy though because you are agreeing to their terms of use in return for the API key, and I'm not sure how that factors in. They're well within their rights to refuse service to you, but if you were able to scrape their data without agreeing to their terms, it may be legal.
Of course there's a million other places to get this data, and I'm not suggesting you scrape theirs. But I don't think there's anything stopping you legally, just some FUD in their TOS.
Would be very curious to hear from the site owners on this topic.
I want to use this, but I'm afraid I will receive that email: "We're sorry, but due to circumstances beyond our control, we regret to inform you that further use of our service will require a monthly subscription fee and the sacrifice of your first born."
There will always be a free plan with a relatively reasonable volume - at minimum, it will always be a 'fremium' kind of thing. At which point we start charging is, frankly, to ensure that we can at least cover serving costs.
Hi - it's actually quite different. As of now, we don't (yet) have a forward geocoding api exposed. Rather, most of the API functionality that's live is for backward geocoding. As in, with Google's Geocoder, you give a string and you get back a place. With us, you give a place (i.e. lat/lon) and you get where that place is and what's around it.
That being said, a number of people have been pinging us about getting simple geocoding functionality, so stay tuned for that as well :).
BTW, there are also a number of other differences - below is a quick list:
- Type of data: One of things we do is combine a number of different datasets (16+ M businesses, points of interest, intersections, etc...)
- Query type: You get very powerful expressiveness in the types of queries you do. You can literally make a request for 'Japanese restaurants that are within 1 mile and that are open at 10pm.'
- Media layers: For most entities, you can get media layers such as Twitter and Flickr. For example, you can get tweets around the mission (http://api.geoapi.com/v1/e/mission-san-francisco-ca/view/twi...). We're adding more layers as we go.
- UserView: Each developer gets a private namespace into which they can add information and run geo queries on it. Basically, you can annotate the world with close to zero effort.
The query syntax is pretty cool, but as far as raw geocoding I don't really get it -- Google has a much bigger dataset than this, offers reverse geocoding just fine (With good neighborhood data in the US and Europe). And I gather you are just proxying requests to twitter and flickr (and not actually storing all this for all places yourself) -- why wouldn't I just query their APIs directly?
Not trying to be snarky, I just don't understand....
"The data in the API is our intellectual property or that of our partners who provided it to us. It is not yours and we are not granting you any broad license to use this data outside of the use of the API."
"You agree that you will not, and will not assist or enable others to:
a) cache, record, pre-fetch, or otherwise store any portion of the Company Content or attempt or provide a means to execute any "bulk download" operations;
...
j) make requests against the API that are not user initiated;"
http://code.google.com/p/geo-api/wiki/TermsOfUse