Metaversum GmbH’s virtual environment Twinity uses Google Maps and 3D mapping-data extensively to create cities, such as Singapore, London, Miami and New York City, match up virtual landscape and landmarks to their physical counterparts, and to make virtual buildings resemble the real thing. The correspondences between the virtual cities and the physical cities are a major feature of Twinity.
“Get creative and design your virtual apartment in an authentic real virtual city or create your own island to host parties, flirt and lead an extraordinary life!” quoth Twinity’s Web-site. “An authentic real virtual city”, huh? I wonder what an authentic fake virtual city might look like. Don’t mind me, the redundancy just rubs me the wrong way.
In any case, that all seems to have run afoul of some unspecified licensing fiasco.
Everything seemed fine up until yesterday, it seems. Today, Twinity started spitting out the message: “Sorry, due to map-data licensing issues, we cannot show cities at this moment. We will try to reactivate the cities in the future. You will be teleported to your previous place or the meeting area.”
It’s hard to say what, exactly, happened – other than someone’s team of undead zombie lawyers woke up and started asserting intellectual property rights and licensing restrictions. It’s not even easy to determine who, but Google would be a good bet.
The phrasing of “We will try to reactivate the cities in the future” suggests that Twinity’s developers, Metaversum GmbH don’t themselves hold out much hope for that reactivation.
[via SLUniverse]
i hate it when that happens.
Importing the google warehouse isn´t such a great idea, obviously.
I cannot imagine how that might be related to this, exactly.
So silly for these virtual world companies to hang more and more of their livelihood on dependencies from the likes of Google.
Take Blue Mars, similar to this Twinity situation, isn’t one of its hallmarks right now Google Maps Streetview integration? I’m guessing Blue Mars doesn’t see enough use right now to incur Google’s new Maps API licensing fees, but if they did, Avatar Reality would be owing Google money ontop of the 30% owed to Apple for in-app BLU$ purchases.
Not sure what exact issue Twinity has run into with licensing/IP problems but virtual worlds built too heavily on external APIs is proving to be a no-no. Bait and switch is always a possibility.
Say what you will about Linden Lab but they’ve done a good job avoiding costly dependencies from external companies and services. There’s exceptions like Vivox and PayPal, mishaps like TPVs leveraging Google’s translation API, but generally things have been fine. I’d like to think for Vivox an actual contract was signed instead of Linden Lab clicking an ‘I agree’ button. For PayPal, I certainly wouldn’t mind if LL created their own payment gateway one day.
True for all online properties its becoming important for virtual worlds to create as much of their own dependencies as possible. Twinity is a neat idea…to mirror the world virtually, but they can’t send their own satellites into orbit so problems like this should’ve been expected.
There could be a bit of a tangle of original map sources and derivative works coming into play here. USGS maps are public domain, aren’t they, but UK Ordnance Survey is Crown Copyright, and the rules are different. London and New York can’t be handled in quite the same way.
Google are the obvious source, but they aren’t the ultimate rights holders. Whoever Twinity made a deal with, they could have been talking to the wrong people.
Tateru, the company is located in Germany, and this country is well known for rigid IP right violation prosecution and extraorbitant fines for content providers who dare to use anything without a valid license. The german ASCAP (called GEMA) blocks/censors half of the Youtube Video content for that reason. The “Map” trouble most probably is only one part of the story. Twinity somehow seems to have been set onto the target list of interested groups and the german law and authorities take any kind of IP rights protection much more serious than you might imagine.
More likely Twinity were “forced” to make that decision, as it now cost money to use Google Maps API
Read http://code.google.com/intl/en/apis/maps/faq.html#tos_pricing
Prices were announced late 2011.
Is there competition for prime RL real estate in Twinity? (“Buckingham Palace/The Playboy mansion is *mine*!”) Has anyone complained because someone else claimed their actual RL location?
I understand that there have been disputes over that sort of thing, yes.