Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Google has either purchased local map data from established companies, or has entered into lease agreements to use copyrighted map data. The owner of the copyright is listed at the bottom of zoomed maps. For example, street maps in Japan are leased from Zenrin. Street maps in China are leased from AutoNavi. Russian street maps are leased from Geocentre Consulting and Tele Atlas.
They also use images from the LandSat 8 satellite.
In addition, the high resolution ones where you can see individual houses and the like when super zoomed in are interestingly often not satellite derived, but from things like airplanes or drones. Ones with just Google (or no specific company) listed as the copyright holder will definitely fall under that as they don't have their own satellites, others might on a case by case basis.
Which, in a way, I find kind of surprising. Google do just about everything else, it seems like having their own satellites wouldn't be an unrealistic thing for them. Maybe it's not worth it when they can just buy imagery from established players.
Great point, and definitely important.
Google has also bought various companies over the years that already have the info and or the means to get the info. A deep dive historical video essay could be really interesting on all of this.