Despite Threat Of $50,000 Fine, Montreal Designer Plans To Release More 'Real World' Counter-Strike Maps

from the if-at-first-you-don't-get-sued,-try,-try-again dept

Recently, we covered the story of a Canadian Counter-strike enthusiast who created a map based on a Montreal metro station. It was greeted with a thorough lack of enthusiasm by Montreal's transport authority (STM), which claimed the map might "create panic among the city's public transport users," before deciding to head off the whole situation using good, old-fashioned, pre-murder-simulator copyright. Diego Liatis, the creator of the map, was threatened with a $50,000 fine by STM, which has done little to deter his efforts.

Ars Technica has a followup story, detailing Liatis' refusal to back down.

Diego Liatis, a Montreal gamer and entrepreneur, told Ars that he still plans on releasing a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive map of Berri-UQAM, the city’s most well-known metro station. He's moving forward—the map is due sometime in March 2013—even if it means a drawn-out lawsuit brought by the local transit authority.

“If you ask me to change the name of the station—forget about it,” Diego Liatis told Ars, starting the sentence in French and switching to English for emphasis. “I understand [copyright law]. But there are limits, such as the name of the station.”

Liatis still believes he has the right to reproduce a real world location and is currently in negotiations (a polite word meaning "lawyers conversing") with the STM to determine what can be left in and what needs to be removed to satisfy the transport authority.

Liatis said he planned on meeting in person with STM representatives later this week. While he is willing to alter the STM logo and a well-known piece of art that hangs above a track, he’s not willing to compromise on the name of the station or its layout.

“Either [the STM] opposes me and we’ll meet in court,” Liatis added. “Or [the agency] will be OK with it.”

The February 11 cease-and-desist letter reminds Liatis that the STM “had warned you that it did not authorize you to use its image nor reproduction of the station in question for this project,” adding that use of its name, acronyms, graphic symbols, and seal are “prohibited by law unless permission is granted by the STM.”

Liatis may be logically "correct" but there's not much logic contained in IP laws. He may be determined to stick it to l'homme, but even members of the LAN ETS community are backing away from Liatis, most likely in hopes of a continued, lawsuit-free existence.

Simon Marin, a LAN ETS spokesperson, told Ars in an e-mail that the university, and by extension its LAN party event (LAN ETS), is "disassociating itself" from Liatis and his map. Marin did not provide any further explanation.

Despite the legal issues and disconnection from LAN ETS, Liatis plans to release the map in the near future. His pushback against government overreach and copyright-as-deterrent is admirable, but some aspects of this story are beginning to paint him as a possibly unreliable narrator.

As quoted in our original piece, and repeated in the update from Ars Technica, Liatis again states that the STM's representative had concerns about the map's usefulness to potential terrorists.

Liatis added that STM's media representative, Amélie Régis, expressed concern to him that releasing the map would allow it to be used by actual terrorists training for an actual attack. Régis also said it would be "insulting" to Montreal's Arab community.

The representative from STM, however, claims she never spoke to Liatis.

UPDATE Tuesday 5:42pm CT: Régis finally wrote back to Ars, saying that she had never spoken to Liatis, and was "really surprised to read the opposite." Ars has contacted Liatis again to clarify who exactly he spoke with at the STM.

Many governments have operated on faith-based paranoia since the 9/11 attacks, which makes it easy to believe Liatis' account of the events. Whatever concerns the STM might have had about "panics" or "terrorists," it may have kept them to itself. Nearly a week on from this interview, Ars is still waiting for Liatis to back up this claim. The STM may be using copyright to block a map it feels could potentially have this effect on would-be terrorists and/or the public, but so far, it hasn't officially stated anything to that effect.

Despite the lack of official statement, it still looks as if the STM simply wants to shut down something that represents its station but adds guns to the mix. Government entities are quick to shy away from anything controversial in the War on Terrorism age, and the STM seems to be no exception. There's a point to Liatis' efforts, but it's likely to be buried under a hefty fine and accompanying lawsuit as he shows no signs of backing down. It's a costly game of chicken and the end result may be nothing more than another footnote in case law reasserting the "right" of public entities to claim copyright protection on publicly accessible areas in order to prevent "misuse" by ordinary citizens.

Filed Under: canada, copyright, counter-strike, maps, montreal, subway, threats
Companies: stm

Craigslist Quietly Begins Testing The Feature It Sued PadMapper For Adding

from the market-research? dept

Craigslist is somewhat famous for keeping its rather antiquated design, and refusing to make changes. Even when well meaning fans have suggested ideas for improving the site, Craigslist has resisted, insisting that it's really just about design companies who are trying to get hired.

So that makes the following story all the more interesting. You may recall that Craigslist has gotten itself into an unfortunate and petty legal spat with the site PadMapper, because PadMapper dared to make Craigslist more useful, in part by putting Craigslist housing entries on a map so people could see where they are. This is a pretty small, but incredibly useful tweak, and Craigslist -- normally a defender of internet freedom -- suddenly turned into a protectionist legal aggressor and sued.

However, as Aaron DeOliveira points out to us, Craigslist has just started quietly testing out its own upgrade... using maps. They're using OpenStreetMap (which is interesting in its own right as more and more companies are moving away from Google Maps to the much more open (duh) OpenStreetMap).

While there may not be a direct connection between PadMapper and Craigslist's decision, the timing certainly raises some eyebrows, and hints at the idea that Craigslist might just be suing PadMapper for improving Craigslist before Craigslist had a chance to launch the feature itself. Or, even worse, Craigslist thought it was such a good idea that it sued PadMapper while using its idea. That's not quite the "open innovation" model that Craig Newmark tries to champion.

For what it's worth, PadMapper's Eric DeMenthon is actually quite conciliatory about the whole thing:

“I’m glad something good came out of all this,” says PadMapper creator Eric DeMenthon. “Lots of people wrote to them about the PadMapper cease and desist [letter], so maybe that convinced them that it was worthwhile to do some mapping themselves.

Market research by suing those who try to improve you? Doesn't seem like the most effective system.

Filed Under: features, maps, market research, updates
Companies: craigslist, openstreetmap, padmapper

TomTom Kicks Off FUD Campaign Against 'Dangerous' Open Source Mapping

from the going-down dept

Recently, Techdirt wrote about the increasing number of Web sites that were dumping Google Maps and turning to OpenStreetMap (OSM) instead. But that's only one aspect of the increasingly important digital mapping sector: another is for use with in-car satnav systems. So an obvious question is: how is OpenStreetMap doing here?

Looks like the satnav manufacturer TomTom has just provided us with an answer (found via Slashdot):

Despite the positives, recent studies have highlighted some major drawbacks of open source mapping, specifically with regard to safety, accuracy and reliability. In one particular instance, a leading open source map was compared against a professional TomTom map, and shown to have a third less residential road coverage and 16% less basic map attributes such as street names. Worse still, it blended pedestrian and car map geometry, and included 'a high number of fields and forest trails' classified as roads.

As TomTom explains, this is a Bad Thing:

Many drivers rely heavily on satellite navigation for precise directions, and mapping errors can be extremely dangerous, particularly in the case of one-way streets.

Just in case you didn't get the message, TomTom concludes:

Open source mapping certainly has its benefits and can be extremely useful, particularly for pedestrians and in city or town centres. The way that the maps incorporate input from a wide community of contributors can result in impressive international coverage, whilst also driving down costs of production. However, when it comes to automotive-grade mapping, open source has some quite serious limitations, falling short on the levels of accuracy and reliability required for safe navigation.

Unfortunately, TomTom doesn't share its sources for these figures, but Carlo Daffara pointed us to this research from December 2011 that provides a more detailed analysis of the relative merits of TomTom and OpenStreetMap in Germany. This is what it found:

With a relative completeness comparison between the OSM database and TomTom's commercial dataset, we proved that OSM provides 27% more data within Germany with regard to the total street network and route information for pedestrians. On the contrary, OSM is still missing about 9% of data related to car navigation. According to our projection for the future, this discrepancy should disappear by the middle or end of 2012, and the OSM dataset for Germany should then feature a comparative route network for cars as provided by TomTom.

So OpenStreetMap is actually better than TomTom for the total street network and route information for pedestrians. However, the study also considered the issue of street names raised by TomTom and "turn restrictions" -- places where drivers must or must not turn:

In addition to the route network comparisons, we conducted further analyses regarding topology errors and the completeness of street name information. The results showed that the OSM dataset is not flawless; however, the trend shows that the relative and absolute number of errors is decreasing. Thus, it can also be discerned that not only is new data being added to the project database but also quality assurance is becoming a major factor within the OSM community. Our findings with regard to turn restrictions within the OSM database, which are of critical importance to navigation, showed that based on the current development rate and activity, it will take more than five years for OSM to catch up with the information found in the proprietary dataset used in our analysis.

So in Germany at least, TomTom's criticisms about the poorer coverage of street names and "turn restrictions" are probably justified -- at the moment. But what the research clearly suggests is that it is probably just a matter of time before OpenStreetMap becomes better than TomTom in this area just as it already is in terms of basic street coverage.

The fact that TomTom has chosen to highlight this current deficiency in OpenStreetMap shows two things. First, that it is watching the open source alternative very closely, and secondly, that it is sufficiently worried by what it sees to start sowing some FUD in people's minds. But as history has shown with both open source server software and open source encyclopaedias, once vendors of proprietary systems adopt such a tactic against up-and-coming free rivals, it's a clear sign that it's already too late to do anything about it, and that their days of undisputed dominance are numbered.

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Filed Under: google maps, maps, openstreetmap, safety, satnav
Companies: google, tomtom

French Court Fails Digital Economics; Claims Free Google Maps Is Illegal

from the yeah,-google's-going-to-jack-up-the-price? dept

Three years ago, we wrote about Bottin Cartographes, a French mapping company, suing Google because Google offers its Google Maps product (mostly) for free. Bottin argued that this was unfair competition, and suggested that it was a version of dumping -- whereby Google was giving away the product to intentionally wipe out the competition, at which point it would raise prices. Amazingly, an economically clueless French court has now agreed, and told Google to pay a fine and damages for its nefarious practice of giving away a product "for free." This is, to put it mildly, ridiculous. Is there any example of Google first wiping out all competition in a market with a free product... and then suddenly jacking up its prices? Yes, Google recently started charging for those who uses its mapping API a lot, but there's nothing, whatsoever, to suggest that the use of free here is somehow an anti-competitive move, rather than just a recognition of a wider strategy. In the meantime, if Google offering free maps in France is somehow illegal, you have to wonder what they think of a project like OpenStreetMap?

Filed Under: antitrust, competition, france, free, maps
Companies: bottin cartographes, google

Company Claims Patents On Generating A Map From A Database; Getting Real Estate Industry To Pay Up

from the lovely dept

Judith Lindenau alerts us to the news of a company named CIVIX-DDI, who holds two incredibly broad and obvious patents on generating maps from a database of location info:

• Patent 6,385,622: "System and methods for remotely accessing a selected group of items of interest from a database."
• Patent 6,415,291: "System and methods for remotely accessing a selected group of items of interest from a database."

Now, I know that patent system supporters always get angry at me for declaring patents obvious, but take a read through the claims (not the abstract) and I defy anyone who knows anything about programming to explain how these patents do not describe incredibly obvious concepts.

Either way, CIVIX-DDI has realized that pretty much every real estate company around likely has a map generated based on a database of location info. So it's been going after them. It originally went after Realtor.com and a variety of local multiple listing services (MLSs). After a bunch were threatened, the National Association of Realtors stepped in, and a few months ago negotiated a settlement, paying up to keep MLSs from facing patent infringement claims. Of course, that's just given the company more money, and so now it's suing Trulia, a useful real estate startup, as well. The industry is realizing that this is putting a serious crimp on much needed innovation in the real estate space:

“Traditionally the real estate industry has been served by a lot of independent software companies. Think about it, Top Producer was a couple brothers from Canada, Advanced Access, eNeighborhooods, Lone Wolf, Tarasoft, Rapattoni, W&R Studios, etc. I could think of a bunch more but hopefully you get the point. It’s not like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft have really focused on real estate software/technology,” W&R Studios co-founder, Greg Robertson told AGBeat.

Robertson continued, “These patent trolls are threatening the ability for these independent software companies to do business. Meaning, bigger companies who have the assets to pay the extortion money will end up being the winners. Independent software companies will either go out of business or get gobbled up by bigger companies. Both scenarios equal less choice for real estate professionals.”

Regarding VC backed companies like Trulia and Zillow, Robertson said, “whether you like them or not, they are the ones really investing and leading on the innovation side. So we are all in this fight together. The consequences are clear; less choice and less innovation.”

Bad patents and bad patent lawsuits are not just a problem for the tech industry. They're hitting pretty much every industry these days, and those who support a totally broken patent system and the awful patents they produce are doing serious harm to innovation and the economy.

Filed Under: maps, mls, patents, real estate
Companies: civix-ddi, trulia

Google Releases Stats On Country Info & Takedown Requests; Leaves Us Wanting More

from the transparency-is-good dept

Google's getting some attention for its decision to launch a tool highlighting the information requests made by various governments to Google, either to gather information or to take down certain content. According to Google, this is a part of its efforts to try to keep the internet more open, as seen by its decision to leave China and its pushing back on Australia's attempts at censorship. Of course, many will claim that this is just self-serving on Google's part, since it's better off with a more open internet -- but that doesn't mean the initiative is a bad idea.

Still, it's not clear really how much there is to learn from this tool. Basically, we see that Brazil requests a lot of information and takedowns -- and the US requests an awful lot of info. And... well.. then we're left wondering. The tool does breakdown the nature of the removal requests, but not in very much detail. And it doesn't do that for the data requests. So, really, all this tool does is leave us wondering what exactly is being requested and/or taken down. Perhaps that's the point of the tool: to get people to ask more questions, but it seems like Google could have done a bit more to highlight that kind of information as well.

Separately, in its op-ed about the new program, Google also suggests that the best tool for encouraging a decrease in repressive governments is through better free trade agreements. If only that were the case. Real free trade agreements can increase openness tremendously, but lately the sorts of "free trade agreements" we've seen have been things like ACTA -- which is not at all about openness, and very much about using the same repressive tools used by China to try to block forms of communication.

It's good that Google is encouraging some discussion on this topic, and perhaps this is the point of the limited tool, but looking through it seems to simply open up a lot more questions than it answers.

Filed Under: data, governments, information requests, maps
Companies: google

There's An Apology For That: AT&T Dismisses Its Pointless Lawsuit Against Verizon Over Ads

from the nice-work dept

We still don't understand why AT&T called so much more attention to Verizon's ads that highlight AT&T's weak 3G network coverage by suing over the ads. Things were made worse when a judge refused to block the ads from airing. Perhaps finally realizing that all this was doing was creating free advertising for Verizon -- and more attention on the quality of AT&T's network -- the company has decided to drop the lawsuit. Apparently, instead, it's going to focus on its own misleading ad campaign.

Filed Under: 3g, advertisements, commercials, lawsuits, maps
Companies: at&t, verizon

Unblurred Google Satellite Images Is The Equivalent Of Yelling Fire?

from the say-what-now? dept

Earlier this month, we wrote about how a politician in California, Assemblyman Joel Anderson, was looking to force Google and other providers of online mapping/satellite offerings to blur images of schools, churches and government buildings. News.com ran an interview with Anderson, where he attempts to defend his proposed legislation as a matter of public safety. He claims that there is no good reason why anyone would need to clearly see these buildings online, and that it can only be used for bad purposes:

Who wants to know that level of detail? Bad people do.

Apparently, Anderson is the final determiner of what good people do and what bad people do with online maps. Then, when pushed on the fact that forcing companies to blur images of public locations might not pass constitutional muster, Anderson claimed that it was the equivalent of yelling fire:

But since when do you have a First Amendment right to yell fire? This falls under the same category.

I'm curious how that's anywhere near the same category. One is deceiving a bunch of people with an alarming false statement, where the resulting response can put people in danger -- and the other is an accurate representation of a building. Am I missing something?

Filed Under: blur, images, joel anderson, maps, terrorism
Companies: google

UK Police Worried About Online Crime Maps

from the so-go-where-the-crime-isn't? dept

One of the first sites that kicked off the whole "map mashup" craze was Adrian Holovaty's ChicagoCrime, which showed the locations of crimes in Chicago placed on a Google map. The site has since been integrated into Holovaty's startup, EveryBlock. However, the idea of an online crime map is certainly now considered quite a useful concept. Unless, you're the police, apparently. Over in the UK, police are complaining about a proposed online crime map, saying that it will help criminals figure out how to go where the police aren't. Indeed, we've already seen that various police departments use data mining tools to try to predict where new crimes will occur, but it seems a bit overblown to suggest that an online crime map would really be such a problem.

First of all, it assumes that criminals are smart enough to plan out their crimes by going online and seeking out low crime areas ahead of time. While that may be true of a few, it seems unlikely that your average criminal is going to do that. Second, there's usually a reason why crimes cluster in certain areas, and it's not like criminals are suddenly going to run to a new neighborhood because an online map shows there's plenty of (or little) crime there. It seems likely that most criminals in high crime areas already know that it's a high crime area. And, if all these criminals suddenly run to low crime areas, then the police should be able to adjust, right? Worst case, they just send more patrols to the low crime areas, since according to their own logic, that's where the criminals will head. And that, of course, shows the fallacy of the police officers' worries. They know that criminals won't rush to low crime areas, or there wouldn't even be an issue here.

Filed Under: crime maps, maps, mashups, uk

Google Inches Toward Wikified Maps

from the community-needed dept

I've been saying for a few months that Google should begin wikifying Google Maps, so that users can make corrections and add missing information to Google's map database. Google took a tentative step in that direction this spring when it allowed people to edit business locations. But now John Battelle reports that Google has unveiled technology that would allow Google to turn Google Maps into a full-blown geographical wiki, with "roads, lakes, parks, points of interest, businesses, cities and localities" all fully editable. Not surprisingly, Google is rolling this out cautiously, making the functionality available first in obscure places like the Bermuda, Grenada, and Jamaica where Google hasn't been able to acquire good map data of its own.

Playing around with the site, the technology is a little clumsy to use, but it works and I'm sure it will get better as Google's UI wizards get some user feedback. The really hard part, I think, will be cultivating the community that's required for a successful peer production effort. People tend to think of Wikipedia as a website, but as Clay Shirky points out, it's better to think of Wikipedia as a bureaucracy for arguing about edits that happens to produce a website as its byproduct. Wikipedia depends on a dedicated core of Wikipedians who referee the editing process, combat vandalism, and resolve disputes. Without them, Wikipedia would dissolve into chaos in a matter of days. So Google needs to figure out how to cultivate an analogous community of Google Map editors. There's a chicken-and-egg problem because they need to let people edit their own neighborhoods to really draw on local knowledge, but the site could be destroyed quickly if they don't have enough public-spirited editors in place beforehand. The incremental strategy they're pursuing so far seems like the right one: get people familiar with the technology, recruit people interested in map editing, and most importantly develop the processes and principles that allow the editing process to proceed smoothly.

Google will also want to think hard about licensing. Wikipedia uses the GNU Free Documentation License, which gives anyone the freedom to reuse Wikipedia content. This serves as a kind of social contract with users, ensuring that the data generated by the community continues to be available to the community. Google may find that it needs to make similar commitments before a significant number of people would be willing to participate in the editing process. On the other hand, freeing the map data might prove different if the vendor currently selling Google mapping data sees it as a threat. In that rather sticky situation, Google might be forced to start from scratch, creating a parallel site created entirely by users.

Filed Under: local information, maps, wikis
Companies: google