He hires out to Bay Area cities all the time. They don’t seem to think its Illegal.
I do topographic surveys by aerial photogrammatry; so do scores of others, daily. It’s very commercial, and advertised in the yellow pages.
Where do you think Google gets their data?
Is Google Map illegal? (LOL!)
It’s a big topic in the industry and hobby community right now. It doesn’t take much of a Google search to turn up relevant articles and the recent FAA memorandum.
Google maps gets data from manned airborne flights, satellites and quite possibly, unmanned drones in the future. They are/will be all licensed by the FAA for those purposes.
It’s kind of funny to watch the slightly used high-end multicopter video platforms turn up one after another in the hobby classified. Well, it seemed like a good idea to make money at the time. They can be flown, and video captured within usual FAA rules (400 ft altitude, etc.), but not used commercially.