[Openstreetmap] Re: money and what to do about it

[Schuyler Erle]

* On 17-Mar-2029 at  5:29PM PST, SteveC said:
> 
> IP wise, whats to stop me reconstructing the image from mapserver tiles
> and selling it in competition with $satellite_reseller? Or, giving it
> away free hence lowering the market value of their product? Unless they
> have extremely liberal license here, or they really want to view the
> person scraping as the infringer... there could be problems?

I believe that Space Imaging's license for the IKONOS data prohibits
redistribution of the raster data unless downsampled to 16:1 or less,
but explicity permits unlimited redistribution of derived vectors.

Anyone volunteering to do vectorization would probably have to sign
(click?) some kind of legal agreement to the effect that they
understand the terms of the license under which we acquire the data
and agree, for the sake of the project, (a) not to copy or
redistribute the satellite imagery, no matter how tempting it might
seem, and (b) that the vectors they create based on the imagery become
the property of the sponsoring organization (e.g. OKFN), to be
published under a suitable Open license that everyone agrees to ahead
of time.

> I'm flipping between thinking its really easy or really hard to do
> properly. It depends a lot on the image scale and what kind of
> topography its looking at. 'Course maybe the image comes with coordinate
> overlays or other useful data.

It will be easy. Any imagery we purchase will have to be georeferenced
and orthorectified.

> > Where can we get a chunk of 1m / comparable aerial photography to
> > experiment with?
> 
> As a proof, just steal it from somewhere.

Actually, Space Imaging offers samples. Someone just has to overcome
the tedium of drawing vectors over some random part of the world no
one cares about and then see what the vectors look like. If it works
(and professional GIS houses do it all the time, so I expect it will)
then we can splash out on the imagery, in the knowledge that it will
be useful, and then experiment with automated extraction or what.

We also might think about a desktop app.

SDE