
Google Plans to Upgrade Old Billboards in Street View - wgj
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_could_soon_augment_old_billboards_in_street.php
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teilo
Wow. I have to think that once this goes live, the lawsuits will start
flowing.

My prediction is that some of the billboard companies will freak out and
demand revenue sharing, claiming misappropriation of their advertising assets.

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natrius
I can't imagine any legal basis for such a claim. Then again, I never went to
law school. If you're _covering up_ the ad and any branding the billboard
company has framing the ad, there's no intellectual property there to defend.

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teilo
Claims actually need a legal basis? If only it were that simple...

But seriously, you're absolutely right. It is not the content of the
billboards that is at issue. It is the use of the virtual billboard that
corresponds to an actual billboard that will almost certainly p-off some
billboard owners. Remember, in most cases billboard owners are not the same as
the billboard advertisers.

It goes back to something that came up often in Second Life's heyday: If you
create a virtual representation of a real-life property, does the real-life
property owner have any claim on its use? I would argue absolutely not.

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Semiapies
I have to suspect that this sort of manipulation would reduce the value of
Street View for a lot of people - those who use it to see what somewhere
_actually looks like_ (or at least did when the Google cars drove by).

Further, considering all the cases where driving directions or identification
of addresses has gone wrong, I imagine that there could be a lot of ads ending
up on walls, in the air, or otherwise not superimposed on a billboard.

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thwarted
Microsoft did something similar in 2006, but with virtual billboards.

[http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-mapping-
goes-3D/2100-1032_3-6...](http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-mapping-
goes-3D/2100-1032_3-6132967.html)

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coderdude
At least in southern California, most to nearly all billboard ads are
positioned along freeways. LA being an exception where you can throw an ad
onto just about _anything_ anywhere.

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gaborcselle
I doubt that people use Google Street View a lot to view billboard ads. Cool
concept though.

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spoiledtechie
they wont go for the ads, but they will def see them...

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gaborcselle
What I meant was: I doubt that advertisers can be talked into buying swap-in
advertising on Google Street view. The number of impressions is just way too
small. The value of these ads will be very hard to quantify.

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pwmanagerdied
"Google Plans to" and "Google filed a patent to" are very different things.

