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Google Earth at the office? You need Pro

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The EULA for the Free and Plus version of Google Earth 4.0 has had a slight reorganization, with a crucial sentence getting promoted nearer to the top.

Before (version 3.0):

1. LICENSE GRANT This Software is for non-commercial use only and your rights in the Software are strictly limited to home, personal or recreational use only by you and not for the benefit of third parties.

[ … Lots of legalese … ] You may not use the Software or the geographical information made available for display using the Software, or any prints or screen outputs generated with the Software in any commercial or business environment or for any commercial or business purposes for yourself or any third parties.

After (version 4.0 beta):

1. USE OF SOFTWARE The Software is made available to you for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Software or the geographical information made available for display using the Software, or any prints or screen outputs generated with the Software in any commercial or business environment or for any commercial or business purposes for yourself or any third parties.

That’s the hint an earlier Ogle Earth post was looking for: Do not use Google Earth Free or Plus at the office (“commercial or business environment”). You’ll need to pay $400 per year for a Pro license. Here’s a product comparison chart for the Free, Plus and Pro versions.

Google Earth as universal geobrowser hasn’t quite arrived yet. If you need a free geobrowser at work, use the very capable NASA World Wind. It too runs KML, though not yet the fancier parts of KML 2.1.

7 thoughts on “Google Earth at the office? You need Pro”

  1. Unfortunately NASA World Wind is only available for Windows. The reason might have to do with its use of Terraserver images.

  2. A Mac and Linux version are in the works, slated for the end of the summer.

  3. Where does this leave non-commercial organisations, like charities? We are are a non-profit organisation and were all set to use GE as a means of making our data more available and more accessible to a wider audience. Are we able to use GE for free?

  4. I’m removing my GE right now!

    Bad move Google! tsc tsc tsc

    I’ll stop developing applications for GE / GMaps; Instead, will change to Atlas, the Microsoft Way. And http://local.live.com/ will be my home.

    Thanks Microsoft Web Developer Express (FREE – and yes, I can use at work to develop!!!!!)

    I was looking for a reason to choose one of those.

    I found.

    Again, bad move Google.

  5. I’ve heard stories of government agencies writing logon scripts that hunt down and destroy any installed copies of the free version of GE so that they don’t get into licensing trouble. I wonder… Is there any way we could start a petition or at least let the Google peeps know that we could really use some kind of Government license for the product – perhaps that we could use a subset of the features without paying for the Pro version. I am a consultant for a state government and they can really see how useful GE could be to them but not everybody would need the Pro version and I can tell you right now if the choice is between $400/year and having a hunter/killer script to keep them compliant with the license they will choose the latter.

  6. Has there been any clarification on whether or not Google views use by government agencies as “commercial” or “business” use?

  7. I live in Tanzania East Africa, currently I have a free version of Google earth However there are several areas which are not atall clear when I try to view…? for example this place s 09.293178 e 33.534417.

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