26/05/2026
Jurisdiction in commercial Earth observation
A practical question for commercial EO operators: when a satellite passes over country A, captures an image, downlinks it to a ground station in country B, processes the data in country B, and sells the product to a customer in country C - under whose jurisdiction is each step of that chain.
The international space treaties answer some of this directly. The Outer Space Treaty and the Liability Convention attach state responsibility to the launching state for the satellite itself. The Registration Convention assigns the satellite to a state of registry. But none of those instruments answer the data question. They were written before commercial EO existed at scale.
What that means in practice is that the jurisdiction question is resolved through three other layers, not the space treaty layer.
Spectrum authorization. The radio frequency the satellite uses to downlink is licensed by the country where the ground station sits, coordinated with the ITU. That license carries operational constraints on power, frequency, and beam shape. It does not carry data jurisdiction.
Imagery licensing regimes. Several states have domestic statutes on commercial EO. The US has the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act, France has the LOAS framework, others have analogous instruments. These statutes apply to satellite operators registered or licensed in those jurisdictions. They typically govern resolution limits, shutter control provisions, and customer screening. They do not extend extraterritorially in any simple way.
Customer contracts. The commercial layer carries its own jurisdiction through the contracts that move the data. End-user license terms specify where data can be processed, where derivative products can be sold, and what claims customers carry against operators. For Thai customers buying EO from foreign operators, that contract layer is currently the only practical instrument that touches jurisdiction at all.
For a commercial EO operator based in Thailand, the operational implications are concrete. The satellite license sits with NBTC for spectrum. The ground station authorization sits with Thai regulators. The imagery itself is not yet covered by a Thai-specific commercial EO statute, which means the licensing layer for downstream products is contractual rather than regulatory. The right legal frame for that product, today, sits between three jurisdictions: Thai domestic spectrum authorization, Thai contract law, and whatever international restrictions the customer's own jurisdiction places on EO imports.
This is the kind of question that doesn't have a textbook answer because the textbook has not been written. Commercial EO is recent enough that the practice and the regulation are still finding each other. Operators that work in this space build the answer one customer at a time.
EOS Orbit operates commercial EO capability from Thailand. We deal with the jurisdiction question on every commercial conversation, and we think the operator practice ahead of the regulatory practice is the only honest place a Thai operator can stand.
