Intellectual Property and GPS Systems

Intellectual Property rights have been an issue for decades now, but recently with the boom of the Internet, it has become a much bigger problem. The obvious issues are with downloading music, movies, TV shows, etc. However, this extends further. GPS systems are all based on using satellites to locate where the signal is coming from. The first few mainstream companies all rushed to get vague copyright laws established on their use of these satellites with the hope of creating a monopoly over the industry, however none of these were successful for obvious reasons.

Now, with the inventions of places such as google maps, which has an incredible amount of places on the earth detailed down to the street level, these copyrights become more interesting. Google obviously obtained their images using a satellite that other companies use as well (their Street View is a different story), so the use of these images can be, in theory, used by any other company in the business. However, there really is no way to tell where they got the images because they could have very well simply done the labor and busywork themselves to put together the satellite images, or they could have simply taken then right from google maps and/or other places of satellite imagery (such as DeLorme).

What companies are now doing to battle this is a long string of 'defenses' to copyright infringement. The most common/basic one, and also the easiest to get past, is putting a watermark image on top of the picture bearing the company logo or name, so they can identify where the image originated. Obviously, this compromises the quality of the image/service, so doing so has a detrimental effect to the company producing these images.

There doesn't seem to be an easy solution to this problem, and each day there seems to be a new idea to help protect a companies intellectual property.