Value of the Imagery?
Shouldn't they be paying me for my images?
With the caveat that I haven't read past what's in the Reg article, isn't there an opportunity to save all of the images and make them available online, like a crowd-sourced aerial mapping site? Then flip the points around so that they pay us instead.
Call me suspicious, but logically the only benefit of doing this stitching "in the cloud" would be to get some raw processing speed... the benefits of which will be entirely lost by having to upload and then download all of those images. Which surely means they're only doing it because either 1) they can, and some people will pay, or 2) they're going to keep your imagery anyway!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
