Thank You

To note, it is considered good form to include a credit to the imagery source even if that source happens to be public domain. There are other reasons for doing this — generally toward the need to fulfill the information gap of tracability back to a source, and so that accuracy can be documented.

This would also generally depend on its end-use — or to what extent you might have modified the source. (If you made the source more accurate, for example — then why would one wish to establish information that might create the misconception that the new product is less-accurate due to its initial source being less accurate.)

Love your blog.

Great post as always! I was just thinking of this on Friday, as I need some imagery in .tiff format, and figured OAM and GDAL would come to the rescue. However, I didn’t have time to investigate–and now I see you’ve posted step by step instructions before I have to figure it out myself! Fantastic! I’ll be giving this a try soon!

I think you’re perhaps missing the point: the images that you’re ‘offering’, or that you put together, are not “yours”. You don’t have the rights to sell them, and in fact, you may not even have the rights to derive the data you are deriving from the imagery. If you don’t understand this, reading through the links and comments on James’s post from a couple months ago may be informative. One comment which I personally agree with, and is worth taking into account:

“There are situations where a GE screenshot could fall under fair use (scholarship and review, etc), but I highly doubt that any of those situations would also involve a real GIS app.”

Using the data the way you are right now — displaying it on the web — may be fair use. But the 7.7MB “DGIM” you posted is almost definitely a violation of the Terms of Service for GEarth, and using or distributing the image is almost definitely a violation of the copyright of the image.

Maybe that doesn’t matter to you. I don’t really know what your goal is in posting it. However, if it were me, compiling a bunch of screenshots from Google Earth, posting it as a file for others to use would be something I would personally avoid, much less participate in any activity that I might think of being commercial with.

Read your most recent blog entry. No other ones — just that one. Especially the sentence at the very end: “Now, the DGIM product at $25 to $150 is an affordable option. No shipping and handling, just digital downloads.”

Try and tell me that without context that doesn’t indicate that there’s a product available: not only that, but since you’re displaying the imagery on the web, I believe you’re also hocking a product that *can’t* exist, since Digital Globe has exclusively contracted their high res stuff for web display to Google.

In any case, whether you can get what you want for $25, $50, or not for any price due to contract restrictions — for at least some cases, you don’t have to spend anything to get data you might be interested in. That’s really the point: The DGIM ‘product’ that you’re touting, whether it exists now or never, is something that people want, and they can, for some types of data, get it for free.