Expect a zero-tolerance approach because they don’t want to set a precedent. Also, think about where this mod is going to be hosted. A site with advertisements? There’s your monetization right there.
It’s an interesting question, and a API license for MSFS would solve a lot for the mods makers.
It would take a ton of manual editing to take those photos and produce a 3D model that doesn’t look like junk, and that point, it doesn’t practically matter where your source imagery came from. Because…
No one has, no one will, and no one will actually care. A few guys making POI add-ons for a Microsoft product, based on Microsoft’s product, is not going to get the attention of anyone at Microsoft.
This would have been great for your original post, and the answer is this is effectively and practically a non-issue.
Wrong… Not that hard using Blender or any other 3D modeling software.
Maybe. But the question relates to literally every add on anyone, large or small, commercial or not, anyone will ever make using Bing Maps as source data.
Wrong. See above. And really – why the hostility? Sigh.
There’s no hostility here at all. It comes off like arguing on these forums, but I’m just trying to be honest and direct. I’d love to see you and others crank out some POI scenery for the simulator, and I’m trying to help facilitate that. I’m saying, “Go for it! And don’t worry about using Bing Maps”. I think your licensing concerns are very valid from an academic or hypothetical standpoint, and if that’s what you want to talk about great, I will leave you to it.
But if we’re talking from the practical standpoint of designing scenery for Flight Simulator, I don’t think using Bing imagery as a source for a Blender model is a real issue one needs to worry about. By the time you edit your model in Blender, clean up those textures, and fill in the missing data in your mesh that the Bird’s Eye imagery doesn’t have, no one is even going to notice that Bing Maps was the inspiration for the work. And if they did, there’s little chance anyone is going to care about the usage of the source imagery. It’s not like you’re taking competitor’s product, ripping it off and distributing it wholesale with no changes. And even those guys doing this with Google photogrammetry are probably going to get away with it. But third party developers, myself included, have been using similar imagery as a source for scenery add-ons for years without issue. You can rightly argue there might be license agreement or copyright violations in there, but in the end it doesn’t really matter in a practical sense. I think you’d waste a lot more time trying to get someone over at Microsoft to take notice of this issue and make sure all the proper channels are being used, than if you just got to work making scenery.