[Foundation-l] Copyrighted maps and Derived works from copyrighted sources.

[WJhonson at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/31/2010 1:56:45 PM Pacific Daylight Time, 
jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com writes:


> The issue is the location of things that are only visible using high
> quality sat images from googlemaps and co. We don't have those
> positions for many of the locations and they are only available from
> non free sources. Because wikipedia does not have a problem with them
> being submitted in mass, it makes the total collection in effect not
> usable for openstreetmap.>>

I'm fairly sure you're wrong about the copyrightability of "high quality 
satellite images".  Since Google themselves did not produce these, they don't 
own their own satellites.  So from where did they get them?  My suspicion is 
that these are free images, they are merely rehosting, and so not 
copyrightable.

W.J.