On the other hand, Fair Use refers to “use,” not whether something has been put in a new context, so I disagree with James on that point. It gives latitude though not a free pass to educational settings, journalists, reviewers etc. and it depends on how much has been copied and with what financial effects as Leszek notes.

James is right to point to World Wind which is surely a much safer option and genuinely free of restriction as it is federal data. The USA has a bright shining tradition of making federal products copyright free (just ask anyone in the UK concerning the OS). I love me my Google Earth just due to the way it has pushed cartography forward but in the end it will have ToS and EULAs.

In your article you only provide a technique by which one could add geo-referencing info that would allow the image to show up correctly in another GIS app - whats agains fair use about that.

If you instead tried to download a ton of tiles to create your own data-set and sell that - that would go against the fair use license. If you tried to sell the geo-referenced data or tried to create a derived work that you sold - then that would be against the fair use license.

Finally, I have got to add - your technique could be extremely useful for some university student or someone doing research to get some data on which they could try some experimental processes. So I am sure there will be a lot of people who will use this technique and still remain within the bounds of fair use of the data.

If you want to convince me and others that using the Google Earth imagery outside of Google Earth itself violates “fair use”, then you’ll need to do it on the legal concept of fair use. Taking copyrighted material out of its original context, transforming it, then presenting it in a different context, does not by itself violate the limitations of “fair use” by the standard definitions of the term, nor does using it in a different fashion that it was intended (cf the artists who transform copyrighted and trademarked material into something else). My post is too short to go into the full details; check the linked Wikipedia article and the references in it for more details. I suspect you’ll find that “fair use” isn’t what you think it is.

For example, you say that moving the imagery from one product to another is where a violation of fair use takes place. But the courts have ruled repeatedly that limited excerpting of copyrighted material outside of its original context is allowable under fair use, the classic examples being the use of excerpts from books, movies or music in reviews, or extended excerpts from books in other books. That material is removed from its original context, modified, and placed into a new context to perform a different function in that new context, but all that is protected under “fair use”, even when you’re making money from selling that review. Taking that argument to the extreme, posting a screenshot from Google Earth to a website would be a violation of fair use, which Google itself (and its content providers) clearly don’t view it as.

As for your “example” at the bottom, you are using the imagery in GE which is what it is designed for. By saving it out and changing how the image is provided, you step over the fair use bounds.

I just can’t see how one can advocate using imagery in GE inside a GIS unless you pay Google a licensing fee. This is a bad idea all around. As I said above, one should stay away from this method of getting imagery into GIS. There are plenty of Public Domain sources that should be used instead and there is no “legality” issues involved.

The issues isn’t if GE is the digital globe of choice or not, but if you are taking imagery from one product and moving it to another without a license.

If you pressed me on this, I’d even call it stealing, but that is just my opinion.

In terms of what the best medium is for displaying shapefiles, I’d say that depends on what your target audience is. If it’s intended for display in non-computer media formats, or in flat non-static format (which distances it from the Google Earth format and makes it more likely to conform to “fair use”), then you create it in a GIS, not in a digital globe. If you’re looking to show it in a digital globe, and want to access the largest number of casual viewers, you convert it to KML for use in Google Earth (and WorldWind too, for that matter).* Fair or not, Google Earth is the digital globe of choice for most people, so that’s where you put it if you want people to see it. If you’re going to display it in a customized fashion, or if there’s a blatantly commercial aspect to the data display, then WorldWind is probably the way to go.

* I don’t think anyone would argue that converting a shapefile to KML format, and then showing a snapshot view of the KML file as displayed in Google Earth, violates “fair use”, especially when the context is non-commercial. Google certainly doesn’t, since they’ve never complained about the thousands of examples of this you’ll find across the Web, and in fact showcase some of them in their Google Earth gallery. How is that functionally different from importing the imagery into a GIS and creating an equivalent image for non-commercial purposes?

Count me in with the “this is a bad idea” crowd. World Wind is the better choice for this by far.