Licensing Imagery for AI Training
Can satellite operators sell their archives to AI developers, and how should such deals be priced and structured?
Chapter summary
AI developers need large, diverse, well-labelled imagery to train geospatial models, and commercial archives are some of the best sources: decades of very-high-resolution imagery, years of daily coverage, and growing SAR libraries.
Key takeaways
- 1
Licensing archives for training is a natural new revenue line for operators, but it raises questions that ordinary imagery licences do not answer: whether the model may be used commercially, whether outputs may reproduce imagery, whether the licence is exclusive, and how to price data that is used once to train a model that is then used millions of times.
- 2
Setcoin expects the first large deals to be structured as multi-year licences with usage-based or fixed fees and restrictions on reproducing source imagery.
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