In a message dated 3/31/2010 1:56:45 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
jamesmikedupont(a)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.