Recently we looked at the Waypoint License Agreement, which we didn’t really like. Well, we later found some folks that appear to be violating the agreement.
Jeff Boulter says in Geocaching blog complete! that he is scraping the data from Geocaching.com and redistributing it. Perhaps the license was different when he first did this, but he does mention saving the data in both places, which is what I thought would make sense, post the data somewhere that is not Geocaching.com before posting it to Geocaching.com, since I don’t see how they could claim the rights to that data then.
Jeff also created a GPS Coordinate Grabber, so now he’s really pushing it, since he’s providing tools for others to violate the license as well. Where will it stop!
Oh, it doesn’t stop, as Buxley’s Geocaching Waypoint also takes that data, and it seems that while in the past there was some sort of “arrangement” with Geocaching.com, that may not be the case anymore, since as of 2004-09-16 Buxley was being blocked (see Status, sorry no permalink.) If you want to follow the development of this, there’s a forum thread titled Buxley New Caches Not Being Updated? to read through…
Oh, and for a bit more background on Geocaching.com and the whole data issue, see The History of Geocaching at gpsgames.org and of course you can’t miss the slashdot crowd’s reactions to such…