I’m working on an app that will be used in public transit vehicles as an advertising system. This is part of a university research project that brings high speed wifi to vehicles. I have a Google Map displayed on the app, but I know there will be times when connections are not working for a few hours at a time. Therefore I want to cache map tiles in a good portion of the city for when the connection goes down. I know Google’s TOS says that cachng is illegal except under the following circumstances: “limited amounts of Content for the purpose of improving the performance of your Maps API Implementation if you do so temporarily, securely, and in a manner that does not permit use of the Content outside of the Service;” I feel as if my app falls under the clause of improving performance of my Maps implementation because I will be downloading the maps for a majority of the time and going to the cache when I absolutely need to. And I would be refreshing the cache quite often too. Do others agree with me that I would be allowed to do this? I haven’t actually done anything yet, so I figured I would get the opinions of others first. Also, does anyone know what “limited amounts of Content” would amount to?
Share
Are you sure that that’s what the TOS say? It looks to me as if there are two possibly-relevant sets of terms.
http://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html (for ordinary Google Maps, I think) doesn’t say anything about cacheing explicitly. If those are the terms relevant to your usage, you might be OK. (The thing I’d worry about is 2a — no copying of “the Content or any part thereof”. What counts as copying for this purpose?) But I’m not a lawyer, neither are you, and if this is important then you should probably actually ask Google.
https://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/legal/us/maps_purchase_agreement.html (for “Google Maps for Business”, I think) goes further than what you say: “Customer may store limited amounts of Content solely to improve the performance of the Customer Implementation due to network latency” (emphasis mine) — and cacheing things to make the system work when the network isn’t there at all seems to go rather beyond that. But I’m not a lawyer, neither are you, and if this is important then you should probably actually ask Google.
If your cacheing strategy results in making more requests than you otherwise might, you should be aware of the limits Google impose on that, too.
In any case, I’m not a lawyer, neither are you, and if this is important then you should probably actually ask Google. (“You” might actually mean “the legal people at your university” or something.)
You might also want to consider OpenStreetMap.