Jason Silver

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

GPX Grabber Being Removed

Classic case of the big guy goin' after the little guy: I got an email this week from Geocaching.com asking me to remove my little application that I created to make GPX files.

GPX files contain GPS data to put in your portable GPS unit. My software was good because it put more extensive information in the file than you would normally be able to get from their web site, including things like difficulty, terrain, descriptions, comments, etc.

Here's the email:

Please be advised that your GeoCache GPX Grabber application violates the geocaching.com Terms Of Use Agreement.

In addition, your use of the geocaching.com Trademark logo to sell a commercial product constitutes Trademark Infringement. 

Accordingly, we are respectfully requesting that you immediately cease all distribution of the application as well as all use of our Trademark.

If you'd like to discuss this further, please contact me.  Otherwise, please respond with confirmation that the above requests have been honored.  

Thank you.

Bryan Roth
Groundspeak, Inc.

f 206.374.8161
www.geocaching.com

So, I'm sorry if you were using this program from my site, or planning on getting it someday. Perhaps it's out there on one of the download sites which caches downloads, but I'm removing it from my site so I don't get lawyers calling me.

If anyone has any insight into the legitimacy of their complaint, or if you're a lawyer, I'd love to hear from you. Please leave a comment.

~Jason

Update:
This is so pitiful. Now Geocaching.com has banned my boys and I from using their web site, even though I have complied with their terms of service by removing the script.

This is all because I refuse to remove Bryan's contact information above-- he's afraid of the fallout he will get, I guess.

They banned me a couple of days ago, then minutes later, unbanned me. Now they're banning again. I'm not sure what the point of this is, eactly, since it's simple enough for anyone to sign up for another account... all you need is a valid email address.

I guess they're just trying to be mean. I don't like mean people, what about you? So, I'm not going to ask you to be mean back, even though that's what the natural reaction might be. Instead, why don't you send Bryan a nice email telling him what a nice guy he is. ;-)

Either I'll set up another account, or maybe I'll explore geocaching alternatives?  Navicache looks promising. :-D