[uuidgen]

They're preventing citizens from publishing that info, not looking around and measuring from what I found.

Imagine a country that prevents its citizens from recording a song they hear and sharing it with their friends. Oh, wait, US more or less does that and forces other countries to implement policies that prevent it or they will ban trade with those countries.

[resters]

Well said. The level of blind jingoism on HN is chilling.

Not to mention that the US government gets any data it wants from banks, telcos, social media, google, etc., which is called metadata surveillance here in the US but it is used to formulate a variety of social "scores" such as one's likelihood to commit "terrorism", etc.

The US GPS system had the signals obfuscated for years so that precise geo coordinates were only available for non-civilian uses. Why bother altering the maps if you can alter the GPS signals. This was rolled back only because hacks were found to work around it.

[javajosh]

>a country that prevents its citizens from recording a song...

False analogy. No-one claims copy-write on the physical world. Well, not except the CCP.

[varajelle]

Songs are being played in the physical world.

I think the analogy is perfectly valid anyway. You're just trying to find an excuse to compensate a dissonance. But all rules are arbitrary.

[8note]

That's not true. Building designs have copyrights as do skylines.

Eg the lights on that tower in france

[Proven]

Unrelated.

Building designs are man-made and in any case this is about taking photographs and not replicating man-made designs.

[pmontra]

Most of the things we care about on a map are man made too. Roads, tracks, bridges, shops, street addresses. I rarely care about where a mountaintop or a river are. I care for the track to get there or the bridge to cross to the other bank or the road to a restaurant.