Map woes

Well, they got sued, which is why their maps were with­drawn and their cur­rent sys­tem is a bit sucky.

As an out­sider liv­ing here, I have to say that I’m heart­ened that a com­pany like Streetdirectory.com is being sued by the gov­ern­ment and will almost cer­tainly end up going out of busi­ness. It’s not that they didn’t offer a use­ful prod­uct, they did. But two fac­tors show me that this was, if noth­ing else, an uneth­i­cal com­pany and deserv­ing of going out of busi­ness. 1 — their ruth­less busi­ness tac­tics against inad­ver­tent “infringe­ment” (I’d com­pare them to the RIAA when it comes to music piracy); 2 — they didn’t actu­ally have a right to use the very core mate­r­ial that they them­selves were suing peo­ple over.

Their argu­ment was that they’d added so much mate­r­ial to the maps that they qual­i­fied as copy­rightable in their own right. This is utter BS, and your court took almost no time in shoot­ing down this argu­ment (I have to won­der who was giv­ing legal advice to these turkeys. I wouldn’t want them on my side in an IP dis­pute). It doesn’t mat­ter that they added value to the core prod­uct. If you take someone’s book and add foot­notes, con­cor­dances and other help­ful infor­ma­tion, you still can’t sell (or even give away) copies of the marked up book with­out the orig­i­nal author’s per­mis­sion. It’s that sim­ple. Street­di­rec­tory took basic map data owned by the SLA and re-sold it with­out a license to do so, then had the unmit­i­gated audac­ity to sue other peo­ple who would use a copy of a map sec­tion to show where their busi­nesses were located (some­thing that could arguably be con­sid­ered fair use). To me, any per­son who engages in these kinds of busi­ness prac­tices should never suceed. They have lots of balls, but lit­tle else.

In the short term, Sin­ga­pore is going to be deprived of a use­ful prod­uct. But already Google maps offer­ing a decent local map­ping prod­uct (as an aside, I gotta won­der where streetdirectory.com was get­ting their satel­lite images, and if they were prop­erly licens­ing them , and it will be a very short mat­ter of time before other local com­pa­nies step in to fill the void, prob­a­bly improv­ing the prod­uct along the way.

I know that to many this appears to be a heavy handed gov­ern­ment action taken for no good rea­son. But, at least in my opin­ion, and in this instance, this seems like a very pro-Singaporean action by the government.

if they hadn’t sued so many pple, they wouldn’t need to take down their maps. bet­ter alter­na­tives are:

http://sg.shownearby.com & http://www.map.gov.sg

Thanks for that, Mr Obama

Cool, thanks for that, John!

I’m an Amer­i­can, liv­ing in Singapore.