Caching and terms of service?

[ljwolf]

Over at gdsbook/book, we use contextily to provide basemaps for many of the maps in our book.

As part of the pre-publication review process, I went through each image we create and tried to make sure that we have license to use all the information in the image.

As a part of this, I had to look into our use of CARTO Positron & Voyager basemaps through contextily (e.g. chapter 8). This led me to the CARTO Basemap Terms of Service, which I had to read & understand in order to check if we can use these basemaps in our book. I'm uploading them here, too, in case the site goes down for some reason.

I note that in Page 4, point 9c in the Acceptable Use Policy, states:

Customer agrees to not engage in the following unacceptable uses of the Basemap Services:
storing, saving, or redistributing any map content from the Basemap Services, including from a cache or
temporary storage, or by using a screenshot or other static image instead of directly accessing via CARTO’s
APIs;

I'm raising this here, because (as I read it) this may potentially conflict with our automatic caching of tiles in a single session... What do developers think about this?

I think a "safe" solution to this would be to disable caching for basemaps with non-CC licenses, or just document this and make sure the user is responsible for when to cache and when not.

[martinfleis]

I would add an option to control whether to use caching or not ensuring that we have a way of conforming to ToS like this one. But I would eventually only document the behaviour and let a user to turn it off manually, leaving the responsibility on a user side.

[martinfleis]

Closed by #217