[Imports] Landsat forest classification

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 8:25 AM, Dimo Dimchev <reactor at abv.bg> wrote:

> The only external data I used is Landsat imagery which is known to be free,
> but what about licensing? Is there need to ask them for permission after the
> vectors in the output are derivative work of their imagery?

The Landsat satellites and all the data they provide, AFAIK, is in the
Public Domain, since NASA and USGS are both Federal agencies of the US
government, and therefore data from those agencies is in the public
domain.

BUT if you received the data from another source, eg a third party
source like landsat.org, then the data is no longer in the Public
Domain, and is subject to license restrictions of that distributor.

Regarding license (not data quality or anything else), the safest way
to know if something is in the public domain is "Was the data produced
by the US Federal Government" (not state or local, but federal) and
"Did I download this data from a US federal agency?"- if the answer to
both is yes, then you're usually safe (though even then there are some
odd edge cases, eg when I worked at NASA on an EOS mission, ESA as a
mission partner and I remember  some questions about some of the data
being licensed in a different way or not. Such questions, though, were
far beyond my pay grade, and not for a sys-admin contractor to decide.

- Serge