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Comment by super256 | Hacker News Reader

You can still do aerial photography for universities while accepting that some people might want their non-public property to be blurred. It's not mutually exclusive.

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Academics and governments are buying imagery from the same sources Google is. I've actually just straight up used Google maps for high latitude archaeology when a grant for imagery fell through.

All property is public.

I believe several centuries of legal precedent disagree with that statement, but perhaps I am only imagining things.

Now, one can say that the government owns all of the land and can do with it as it pleases, but that is different from all land being public.

I think you missed the context or intentionally misinterpreted my comment. All real property is publicly viewable from overhead. That has nothing to do with private property rights.

That depends on whether you consider the air to be part of the property or not. When aviation was invented it was a widespread legal and philosophical thought that the owner of property owned the air above the property. "Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad cœlum et ad inferos" - he who owns the soil has from from Heaven to Hell. So pilots would have to get permission from each property owner they wanted to fly over. From that perspective, a satellite or aircraft flying overhead is trespassing. We didn't go that way. Governments legislated and took seizure of the air as common rights of way, and curtailed private property rights when they did so. It's probably better that way. But there's a certain logic to the old ad cœlum definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_est_solum,_eius_est_usqu...

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