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

[jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 11:04 PM,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> 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.

I have been looking to purchase sat images for usage in tracing for osm.
It is not possible to purchase images that you can share with other
people in general. Even if you have the rights to trace and extract
vector information. So they must have a special deal on that imagery.
We dont know what license they have and what rights, it is pretty
simple.

The source of  google images you can see pretty easily in google
earth, just turn on all the "more" layer, you will see each image and
where it comes from. It is the same data used in google maps.

The good imagery is from digitalglobe, geoeye and spot  for the area
that i am interested in,
for example we are working on mapping the city of shkoder, in google
earth, you can click on the area
http://archive.digitalglobe.com/archive/showBrowse.php?catID=1010010001E43801

But the point is, even if google gets these rights, it does not mean
they have to give them to us.

The digiglobe allows for some users the right to create vector traces
from the data, but does not mean google gives us these rights.

http://nsidc.org/data/barrow/digitalglobe_license_form.html
. 	DERIVED WORKS.  Derived works containing imagery data from the
Products are covered by this License. Derived works that do not
contain imagery data from the Products are not covered by this
License. For example a vector map (features, buildings, waterlines,
classification) derived from a Basic Product is outside of this
license.

mike