Anthony wrote:
On 11/25/06, Steve Summit <scs(a)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.)