Mally writes: > 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. >
Hi Mally, First of all my apologies for dropping you in it in this way. I did think long and hard before pressing the send button on that post, but it seems to me that the conversion mentioned will most likely be technically possible within the next 6 to 12 months or so, so it's something that needed clarifying really. > 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. > Your comments above are quite encouraging. I agree that possible unauthorised redistribution must always be a concern, but my gut feeling is that its no more likely for converted FlightGear scenery to get 'passed around' than the original MSFS scenery. I also understand your comments about Getmapping and licensing issues. In the light of those comments, I certainly wouldn't make a conversion script available without explicit clearance from both yourself and Getmapping. > In any case, I think that generating textures for FlightGear from the MSFS > textures would not be the ideal solution. I've not been following the [ammended post quoted in line above] > 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. Well, I can only speak for myself, but I would *love* to see the Getmapping data (image and elevation) become commercially available as scenery for FlightGear. The data has been generated by a private company running very real costs in airtime, film costs, processing costs and who knows whatever other costs, and I don't think anyone would begrudge the fact that it costs very real money to buy it. I'd go so far as to say I'd be prepared to pay a reasonable premium above the cost of the MSFS scenery in view of the likely lower sales expected, especially if it were to better exploit the original as mentioned. I guess that at the moment this whole discussion is still relativly moot, since FG doesn't have support for scenery texture paging, but that's likely to change at some point in the not too distant future, and I think that the posts generated by the screenshots of Mat's experiments certainly show there is considerable interest in photo scenery among FG users. All ten of us. (Joking ;-)). Cheers - Dave _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
