They can't be, unless Google decides to enforce them. It's not the first time they crowd-source massive amounts of specialized effort, only to steal all the dat

They can't be, unless Google decides to enforce them. It's not the first time they crowd-source massive amounts of specialized effort, only to steal all the data, close them off and get away with it. Panoramio is the biggest one I know. They essentially stole 10 years worth of effort from a community collecting carefully positioning millions of geo-tagged photos. Then you have Youtube. It's not completely closed off, but you can't query the video database, you can't discover any of the old content, and they "delete" (hide from the public) all issues they consider controversial or against their political beliefs. Now it's possible they used the good old 3Es to stimulate academic research relevant to their targets, use it to create useful products, and then patent everything to choke out the competition. Of course they have better ways to kill competitors (imagine the massive potential for undercutting they have, and how nobody cares about undercutting in the online world).