re images of earth in article apr cs ruu nl clldomps cs ruu nl louis van dompselaar writes in apr unocal com stgprao st unocal com richard ottolini writes beware there is only one such copyrighted image and the company that generated is known to protect that copyright that image took hundreds of man hours to build from the source satellite images so it is unlikely that competing images will appear soon so they should sue the newspaper i got it from for printing it the article didn t say anything about copyrights no explicit c is necessary if it the image is attributed to the geosphere company then there is a likelihood permission is has been given to reprint unlikely that the owner can or will go after individuals however interesting images do make their way into ads and computer demos that is when a pirate might get some flak this image is considered so interesting that many people would like to use it whenever some global map is needed so there is lots of temptation one mail person said since the source data satellite imagery is not copyrighted then the derived image can t be not true a new distinctive creative expression of the data can be protected this image is certainly fits such since no one else has taken the tremendous effort to re create it themselves precedent is a recent telephone book court case ma bell tried to copyright the data in their books and prevent competitors from copying it there are trick entries in the book but the court only permitted copyright of the expression of the data and not the data themselves you cant xerox and sell the telephone book there will be more attention to digital copyrights in the future and computer becomes a mass product and moguls such as bill gates are currently hoarding the digital copyrights i d prefer that geosphere put this data in the public domain because it is very interesting to me and others but that s the way things are
