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List:       flightgear-devel
Subject:    Re: [Flightgear-devel] Re: Scenery
From:       David Luff <daveluff () ntlworld ! com>
Date:       2004-01-31 19:46:46
Message-ID: 20040131194646.6f2ec1bd.daveluff () ntlworld ! com
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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

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