> OK, I was feeling a bit like the honorable William Jefferson Clinton for a > minute there, i.e. wrongly accused. > > That message came from randy@mapsurfer.com
Sorry if I said something wrong. I did not think the fact that Grounded Inc. was making revenue from the game was in dispute, although technically this is speculative from my point of view.
Sources possibly include one or more of the following -- commissions on the sale of gps receivers, web advertising, licensing deals, and clothing.
That wasn't the point. As long as its legal, they can collect as much revenue as they want to offset costs of operating the site, pay salaries, make a buck, etc, for all I care. I'm a capitalist. If Jeremy can quit his day job, good for him. The point was that the business model requires the goodwill of land owners and land managers (as well as everyone else) to work, and they should possibly be asked.
Moreover, it would be nice to know that a cache I am hunting has the good graces of the land owner or manager before going out. Caches _have_ required trespass to find, without warning, and I would not want a landowner coming at me with a shotgun or a ranger coming at me with a citation because I did not know what was going on. I do not think this is difficult to understand, nor unreasonable. Sorry if my first post wasn't clearer.
Perhaps it is on me to find these details out before hunting. However, if 20 people hunt a cache, 20 people have to do this work. If the hunter does the work, and provides it as a checkbox with the cache, then one person has to do the work, and more goodwill is fostered up front. I think in the long run, this will be necessary, as more land owners hear about trespass and more rangers hear about caches in sensitive areas.
And I'm sure if you wanted to play badminton at an off-trail location at a park, you would have to get permission from the rangers. Sport orienteering and rogaining, sports which place "flags in the park" for people to hunt (sometimes with GPS receivers in some variants of rogaining), without fail require written permission from the landowner to proceed.