Google Plans to Upgrade Old Billboards in Street View | Hacker News Reader

Google Plans to Upgrade Old Billboards in Street View

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19 pointswgj10 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-mapping-goes-3D/2100-1032_3-6...

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.

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

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

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.

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

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