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NOAA Requires License For Photos of the Earth
Teancum writes "In an interesting show of the level of regulations private spacecraft designers have to go through, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has demanded that American participants of the Google Lunar X Prize obtain a license if their spacecraft are 'capable of actively or passively sensing the Earth's surface, including
bodies of water, from space by making use of the properties of the electromagnetic waves emitted, reflected, or diffracted by the sensed objects.' What prompted NOAA to ask for this license came from a visit by the XPrize staff to the NOAA offices in Maryland. What is going to happen when 'space tourists' bring their private cameras along for the ride?"
The Space sensing act of when??
Is the US government the only entity that can image the planet from orbit?
What, are they scared I might take a photo of the aliens in Area51?
And what if I'm snapping away at Africa? Australia?
Do I go to jail or what??
Ridiculous.
Well then, looks like the winner of the Lunar X Prize won't launch in the US, and probably won't start a business here either.
The rest of the world is nowadays inclined to treat american laws with a huge "fuck you".
Seriously, the russians (already doing it) and - god help us all - the british (virgin) are the ones already strongly involved in private space tourism. America sucks so much these days.
Cruise agencies, bus companies, airline companies do not require licenses or royalties for photos that are shot by their customers.
you cant either. probably the underlying reason is NOONE CAN COPYRIGHT/PATENT EARTH
so cut the crap.
Read radical news here
All Soviet jokes aside, anyone notice how much the United States is resembling more and more the old school buffoons of the USSR ? It was illegal to possess accurate maps in the old USSR, to protect state secrets. Now we have the US claim you need a license to take a picture of the earth. It's just a 21st century version of screaming, "Papers Please". I for one, don't hail our old overlords.
It seems like it would be hard to enforce jurisdiction in space
But that's really the whole point you see; extending government jurisdiction into space. Suppose Virgin Galactic builds a space hotel, is it an independent nation? A privately owned holding not subject to any man made laws? What about 100 years from now, I'm sure the governments of Earth would prefer to have control over Lunar He3 resources. To do that they need to start slowly establishing authority in space. Next, any space hotel will be declared to be under the control of the home nation of the corporation that builds/operates it. Then that nation just expands it's sphere of influence in the name of security,exploration and manifest destiny. Really it's just a land grab.
We are all just people.
It looks like the purpose is to protect the commercial interests of private space companies. If all the sudden people are launching rockets and giving away the data for free, that hurts space commerce. ... This policy probably had good intentions, but is now very out of date.
Saying "if other people make money doing X, we're going to pass a law preventing you from doing X for free" never has good intentions. It can only be a favor to existing commercial interests in return for their lining politicians' pockets.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Even for Slashdot, this is an overreaction. This is nothing more or less than a country having a law on the books that, read literally, applies to a situation that nobody envisioned when the law was originally written.
When you read the law in question, it was meant to regulate satellite operators from giving space images of sensitive American installations to not-so-friendly people. Seems pretty reasonable not to want the ABC Satellite Company to give high resolution images of military facilities to the Russians and Chinese, doesn't it? Unfortunately the way it was drafted it also applies to space tourists.
The law isn't stupid, it's just broader than anyone realized at the time Stupidity would be actually prosecuting anyone for taking a few snapshots out the spacecraft window without a license.
My hometown still has a law on the books that cars aren't allowed to scare the horses travelling down Main Street. Anyone want to get up in arms about that one while we're at it?
If Cuba ever gets its act together, it could become the hub of private space.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Yeah, but you have to have the permit that takes 4 months to get, in order to get the other permit you need, that takes 6 months to get. It's not so bad, really, when you can get them all concurrently, but when you have to prove that you've done X before they'll let you do Y, and there's a chain of these things, and at any point, a capricious "civil servant" can put the brakes on anything because he's an ass..
Well, you can see how it takes a decade to start building a bridge or small port facility. Let alone a business involving huge energy expenditures and noise, and any number of dozens of things small minded curmudgeonly objectionists will latch onto.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
What's scary is that I can't tell if you're serious.
The NOAA doesn't have any jurisdiction outside the US to require a license for anything done there. Spacecraft orbiting over the US are not part of the US, despite simpleminded interpretations of "air rights" regulation. Electromagnetic waves coming from the Earth's surface outside US boundaries are not subject to any NOAA jurisdiction. And NOAA doesn't have jurisdiction over electromagnetic waves coming from private property, or publicly viewable surfaces of any government property, whether publicly physically accessible like parks and roads or even the outside of NOAA buildings.
In fact, I don't see anywhere in the Constitution where NOAA has any power to regulate anything, certainly not photography of objects viewable by people who are standing somewhere legally.
NOAA can take its license requirement and stick it up its... er, NOAA doesn't even have one of those.
--
make install -not war
The problem is that they are still citizens. They didn't lose that when they left the planet. They are still under the competent jurisdiction of the US or whatever country and this law. Also, while they are on the planet, the country can control when they "lift off" which sort of foils any "your not the boss of me" arguments.
I personally don't see it as a problem. Just a nuisance at best.
Sure. Give up citizenship and no hope of returning as a citizen.
I doubt that would happen in many cases, but it is an option. BTW, if your launching like that, you can't have your company located or doing business in the US either. Your limiting quite a few things.
I wonder what is the working definition of space ... Some satellites operate within the earth atmosphere and do in fact sense the earth from the atmosphere. What is the height at which one should obtain the license? Images from a plane are fine? a photo camera is nothing more than a sensing device operating in the visible part of the spectra ...
My hometown still has a law on the books that cars aren't allowed to scare the horses travelling down Main Street. Anyone want to get up in arms about that one while we're at it?
If I were living in your town, I certainly might complain if some heavily lobbied government group suddenly started forcing people to buy licenses based on that law.
-FL
When considering questions of Jurisdiction like this, certain thorny questions arise. Is there 'no' law in space? Could you 'legally' commit murder in space?
There is a historical precedent for dealing with a similar question which arose in Maritime law - does any country have any legal authority on ocean-going vessels in international waters? People, fundamentally, don't want to lose all protection of law in such situations.
I don't really know much about Maritime law, but my basic understanding is that every ship has to be registered with some nation, and has to fly the flag of that nation. The law of the nation whose flag you fly applies on-board that vessel when it is in international water (at least, I think that's how it works). Now, Maritime law has been 'settled' somewhat, I think, by some International Treaties, and I don't know if any such treaties exist for space.
However, dealing with the issue of Jurisdiction in space, it seems most logical to extend the concepts of Maritime law to space.
That said, I still think it's completely ridiculous to claim that it is illegal to photograph the Earth, but there may be a precendent in Maritime law for US 'vessels' to have to submit to US jurisdication in legal matters when they are outside of the physical boundaries of US jurisdiction.
I beg to differ. From the summary:
What's a photograph if not the passive sensing of reflected light, which of course is a very specific band of EM waves? And if that photo is from space, then it's damn well remote, isn't it?
I can understand the desire to prevent active sensing, for the sorts of reasons you mentioned, but passive? All you're doing is observing.
No, I'm afraid you don't really understand. The 1992 law is a piece of a strategy that has, so far, failed. The idea, as described in the signing statement, is to "[...] encourage future commercial opportunities" by "[...] supporting investments in new remote sensing technologies".
This law (and many others that failed, thankfully), came out of a philosophy that proposed that private interests could do a better job than the government at disseminating data. It's totally cynical, of course: These entities just wanted to charge for what NOAA could distribute for free and make sure that any data that NOAA and similar agencies already had was "licensed" to them (i.e. not given away).
Accuweather's (for one) last attempt to "privatize" data was in 2005. It's almost a bi-annual effort.
On reflection, I can see how you could make a case for this law in the realm of remote imaging from satellites. This law was written for Digital Globe. The justification was that an imaging company needed government help to make the work economically feasible. But, obviously, the X-Prize foundation has a different philosophy on encouraging space exploration :).
Sucks that the DoC got stuck with implementing this thing. My main point is this: This is not NOAA's fault. Somebody at the Commerce Department threw a hissy (likely somebody at Digital Globe or GeoEye complained), and this law is indeed on the books.
Again, in summary: Please don't blame NOAA. They do amazing work, give us all the data we want for free with no hassle, and have resisted efforts to take away our (taxpayers) data. They're the good guys. Seriously. Very good nerds. Nerds that we can only dream of becoming someday.
Yes, the knee-jerk reaction seems to be "license == BadThing(TM)" or maybe "Govt. steals PRIVATE data" but without laws specifiying that certain clauses must be included in the license we would be left with the default copyright laws which I think most people here would agree are unacceptable for trashy romance novels let alone unique raw data sets concerning our home planet. Perhaps private companies in the mold of Disney would decline to take part becuse they have to share data about our planet, but IMHO that's a GoodThing(TM). It also reduces the burden on the taxpayer if private consortiums are forced to share scientific data, the only downside I can think of is the double edged sword of "national security" (control people vs share data).
As far as space exploration goes the worst thing that has happened recently is this obvious attempt to silence the most powerfull tool available for montoring the biosphere. Maybe it's non-obvious that in govt budgets, funding is tied directly to the agency's "mission statement", or maybe I have my tinfoil hat on too tight and NOAA/NASA budgets are not related? Anyway, since I'm not an american taxpayer I can hardly complain about the informative freebies NOAA/NASA already provides, and I admire Hansen as both a scientist and a public servant willing to "speak truth to power".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If 95% of civil servants are dedicated, but overworked, and you've got a chain-of-permits ten-deep, you've got a very good chance (>40%) of running into at least one who cares more about his little tin fiefdom than about the people trying to actually accomplish something.
Are those numbers unreasonable? I certainly hope so.
Nevertheless, every regulatory hurdle is one more opportunity for someone to use the letter of the law to bully people.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The complete height of hubris,to License(permission)to take pictures of the planet we stand on and share.
This is completely overboard and out of the realm of the constitutional place of the government.
The only way to end this is to ignore it and take all the pictures you want.They don't own it so screw em.If they try to enforce it resist even up to firearms.This is the patriotic way of telling the government where to get off.Revolution.
If more people revolted at the governments folly rather than rolling over and taking it in the ass,we would have less rather than more interference from big brother at the cost of their lives.
Complete bullshit,get a rope!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!