My source is the current EULA for Google Maps and Google Earth.
A disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer or a copyright expert
The link you posted talking about fair use pretty much sums it up for Condor landscapes:
Creating a large-area, high-resolution georeferenced mosaic of just the imagery alone, and then posting it for download on your website, even if you don’t charge for it, will in all likelihood earn you a cease-and-desist letter from Google, and for good cause.
That is pretty much what you are doing when creating a landscape. Even if you add the height data, trees, thermal map ect. The base images are still pretty much the downloaded textures, maybe with a touch up here and there. That is (IMHO) definitely not "transformative" under fair use.
The EULA permits limited download and display of the images provided that you do not remove the watermarks and logo's. A gliding example: If your club wants to make a briefing showing where the trafficpattern and landing areas are using a google maps image as the base, you can do this under the EULA. You just have to keep the watermarks visible. You can then draw on the image what you want to show and provide it for free on your website, print it to display at the airfield ect.
Knipsel.JPG
The image above would constitute fair use for example. I'm using a limited bit of data to make my point clear. I'm displaying all the copyright data. In this case the red arrow showing that the images belong to Aerodata International Surveys. This is an aerial survey company operating several GA planes for aerial photography. The blue arrow shows that the GIS data comes from Maxar Technologies. That is a satellite operator having several earth observation and synthetic aperture radar satellites in orbit. The Yellow box shows googles own watermark.
All these need to be displayed when using the images according to the EULA. Condor is a pretty niche product, but if any of these companies smell money you may be lucky if they only sent you a cease and desist letter. We are not talking about peanuts here, as you said it may be several million euros worth of images...
A good video to watch about copyright law and fair use is by Tom Scott:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU. It is quite long, but it has some good examples of real world "fair use" and abuse of copyright.
I'm 99.9% sure you can get into trouble using google images on your landscape. There are countries that provide images in HD for free, some only for their citizens.
6266 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 01, 2022 7:38 am
If I would be responsible for Condor, I would try to get an official agreement with the suppliers (google, bing a.s.o) to use their images in landscapes. If there exist such an agreement, everybody can be safe in using it. Especially FAI should be interested in such an agreement. Using landscapes with a theoretical risk of a copyright problem in a semi-commercial event like the FAI GP ... I stopp thinking now.
The landscape that comes with Condor uses synthetic images. Those are no problem at all as they are completely original. These photorealistic landscapes are made by users like you and they are responsible for the legality of the data. I bet you it will not be cheap and may draw the attention of the copyright owners onto our little community. So I don't think the Condor team should contact Google or Bing ect.
I may still have some tileable base images to create synthetic textures somewhere (Grass, trees, fields). You can use them with masks created with any GIS software to create pretty convincing almost photorealistic textures.
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