Dave > ... It would be nice to know whether visualflight regard buying the > MSFS scenery and converting it for personal FlightGear use as fair use or > not. ....
As you (Dave) know, I'm the developer of Visual Flight photo scenery, though I've been on the flightgear lists for many years under my nickname rather than my full name so this fact may not be generally more known. I've never wanted to mix work with leisure, so I've been trying to stay out of this discussion as far as possible, but that's become increasingly difficult, and it would not have been fair of me not to have declared an interest at this stage. I'm still thinking over what you've said, and my very preliminary thoughts are that it would be fair use provided that it was done for personal use only and by somone having a legitimate copy of the original scenery. The major concern would be if the converted textures started changing hands behind the scenes. Development of the photo scenery was a major undertaking and I'm only making a very small percentage on each sale, so anything which might undermine what little return I'm getting would be most unwelcome. Of course Getmapping would have a major interest which would have to be considered. Fair use or not, using the Visual Flight/Getmapping textures in this way would be in breach of the EULA, and I think Getmapping would take the view that a license of some sort would be required to uphold the integrity of the EULA, even if this was issued free of charge. In any case, I think that generating textures for FlightGear from the MSFS textures would be the ideal solution. I've not been following the technicalities of the experiments carried out by Mat, but MSFS has a fixed resolution for scenery of this type, and it could be that FlightGear could better exploit the resolution of the original Getmapping imagery. The source data is available down to 0.25m/pixel or even 0.10m/pixel in major cities, though I've no doubt Getmapping would want a return on their investment commensurate with the resolution used. I doubt that it would be acceptable to the FlightGear community to produce a commercial photographic scenery from the Getmapping data, but that's a bit of a shame as it should be possible to come up with something which would exploit the potential of data such as Getmapping's Millennium Map much more fully than is currently possibly with MSFS. Mally --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.572 / Virus Database: 362 - Release Date: 27/01/04 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
