[WikiEN-l] Google Earth screenshots

Sun Nov 26 13:00:57 UTC 2006

> Careful and precise are not the standards for copyright protection.
> Creative is.  In the case of an image which is completely from a
> single public domain source, there just isn't anything creative being
> done.  You stitch together the tiles in a completely algorithmic
> manner.  If anyone holds the copyright on the resulting work, it would
> be the person who chose what scene to picture (the user of the
> software), not the person who wrote the software.  That is also the
> person who put the work in fixed form, another requirement for
> copyright protection.
>
> I say show me the creativity.  I don't see it.  I actually don't see
> much creativity in any satellite photography, but when it comes to
> creativity from Google in a typical Google Earth shot, I don't see any
> at all.

The algorithm would be creative, which should be enough. Would you say
a painting made using a rubber stamp wasn't creative because anyone
can cover stamps in paint and put them on a piece of paper? The
creativity comes in making the stamp, and so, what you make with that
stamp is copyrightable.