Anthony wrote:
On 11/25/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Um, have you ever looked at Google Earth? It contains much more than satellite photography.
And I never said all of Google Earth imagery is public domain. I said "Much of Google Earth imagery *is* public domain."
Oh, okay, sorry.
The stuff ain't PD. I'm prepared to be proved wrong, but as far as I know, it's quite legitimately copyrighted.
Are you trying to say *none* of it is PD, or are you saying *some* of it isn't? I agree completely that *some* of it likely isn't PD.
Well, I was going to hazard a guess that most if not all of the *interesting* portion of it is not PD, where "interesting" means "is likely to be screenshotted by Wikipedia editors".
One interesting thing to look at is just how much Google Earth screeshots differ from 1) World Wind screenshots; and 2) the real thing - from that location and angle.
That would be interesting, and I'd be happy to help, but I don't have access to World Wind (it's Windows-only, AFAIK). We could start with the five images which Bogdan Giusca cited to start this thread:
Someone has already replaced this with a World Wind image. Since it covers a wide area, it's comparable.
This one's already tagged as a copyvio, and will be deleted in a few days. It's centered on lat/long 33.663065, -117.806551. If someone can make a 2000 foot (600 meter) wide World Wind screenshot centered on those coordinates, that would be a useful comparison.
This is also a wide-scale image, so the World Wind data is likely to be comparable. It's about 300 miles / 480 km wide, centered on lat/long 8.90, 28.94.
This one is pure map data, not satellite or aerial photography at all.
This one has evidently already been deleted.
(But, hmm, given that two out of three of the remaining images are wide-scale, I may have been wrong in my guess that "most of the interesting data" is unavoidably copyrighted.)