File talk:Biloxi pascagoula katrina w.jpg

“Processed by Terra Prints Inc.” ?

In the first sentence of the file description it says that the imagery shown is “Processed by Terra Prints Inc.”. As far as I can see, this is a simple screenshot which obviously was captured on a joint USGS/NASA website, and it appears that not any “processing” was done to it. Furthermore the quality of the image is quite low. It is relatively small (and quite small for a “poster”) and shows high degree of JPG compression (supporting the assumption that it is a simple screenshot). Hence the source and authorship given overleaf may be misleading or even be plain SPAM! Unfortunately it appears that it is not possible to reconstruct the correct source anymore because the upload was 2006 and the respective website probably has changed (and moved) since then. Nevertheless the probably inaccurate data given in the file description should be corrected… --Gretarsson (talk) 16:18, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

Update: I just noticed that there are lots of similar (but not identical) cases: relatively small (long margin not longer than 1000px; file size sometimes even considerably below 100 kB) JPG files with public domain satellite imagery were uploaded by User:Rolandc73 along with a link to the terraprints website in the source field and claiming authorhip for these public domain images (see User:Rolandc73/gallery and User:Terraprints/gallery). In fact this is not illegal since these posters can be regarded as derivative work for which individual authorship can be claimed. But I consider it as bad and illegitimate practice. And the motivation is not hard to guess: SEO (by generating lots of backlinks to terraprints.com) and PR… --Gretarsson (talk) 16:37, 5 January 2020 (UTC)