I'm not a lawyer. When you get sued, hire a lawyer. Or hide somewhere safe.
For aerial imagery, almost everything on the USGS website is public domain. Do whatever you want with it. The resolution is not that good, although it is at least as good as a lot of Bing aerials, which on the whole are pretty awful. I think (I DON'T know) that Orbx MAY have used some USGS stuff for SOME their sceneries. You can use it. It's not great close to the ground around airports and such, has some ugly color mismatches, some cloud cover, but it's free, legal to sell and gives a passable result. Check out
https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov. Other parts of the world may have their own government funded sources that are free and public domain.
Pretty much anything else (Google, Bing, etc.) is considered intellectual property. If you download and use yourself they would never know. If you build a package and give it away, technically you're giving something away that the recipient could get for free themselves from the same source. Unless you modify the imagery. That is a derived work. Different set of rules and technically a violation of Googles TOS, but still probably not going to get you sued.
Build a package using Google imagery and sell it and you have violated the terms of service that Google et al sets out for their stuff. Will they tell you to cease and desist? Quite possibly. Will they sue? Probably not, unless you're the guy they decide to make an example of, which would not be fun. However, you will almost certainly only be sued if you ignore their cease and desist order. They won't tell you to cease and desist unless that is what they want you to do and they won't let you keep using their stuff after they have told you not to. If they tell you to stop using their stuff, stop using their stuff. If you want to create and sell scenery using aerial imagery, buy the imagery and expect it to be very, very expensive. A license to sell imagery for 2 miles around LAX could easily cost $10,000. You have to sell a lot of scenery to cover that.
With regard to corporate logos on buildings: If I can see it from any place where I can legally be, I have an absolute right to photograph it and publish that photograph anywhere I choose for public interest. That is called fair use. Consider the plane-spotting websites (airliners.net, etc.) If the corporate logos on the airplanes were somehow 'private' those sites couldn't exist, and in any event the photographs themselves are the intellectual property of the photographer, not the airline whose logo is depicted. The photographer has the absolute right to sell, for profit, his photograph of an airplane bearing a corporate logo. I think the principle here is if you don't want people to photograph your logo then don't put the logo where it can be seen in public, which rather defeats the point of having a logo. Further, if I can create and sell an airplane livery for MSFS bearing an airline or aircraft manufacturer corporate logo (as has happened countless times) how then can doing the same with a building be considered manifestly different. Either both are permitted or neither is permitted, but it isn't clear that selling airline liveries for simulators is, in fact, permitted. This has not been tested in court as AFAIK. Certainly it's been going on for decades and there is a legal argument that any airline that doesn't want it's logo used in this way has had ample opportunity to do something about it. At this point it is impossible to stop it as there are thousands (or more) liveries in the sim market, circulating for free and as payware, on countless servers in many different countries. Good luck to any corporation who thinks they can stop that. Typically, provided your use of the logo is not derogatory to the corporation they aren't going to make a fight of it.
In addition to all of this there is the notion of context. I can photograph an airliner and publish that photograph online for public interest and there isn't much the airline can do about it. However, if I use that same photograph in an advertisement for a product then that is a whole different set of laws. If I am Airbus I can say in an advertisement that Airbus is better than Boeing, but I'll get sued if I use a Boeing logo in that advertisement. A news story comparing Airbus to Boeing can use both corporate logos without fear of lawsuit, even if they say unflattering things about both companies.
My own approach to all of this is that I stay away from anything Google, Bing, etc. for aerial imagery. It isn't worth the risk. Who wants to put six months work into a project only to be told you can't sell it or even give it away?
For a building texture, with or without logos, if it is downloaded then there is a photographer somewhere (professional or amateur) who owns that intellectual property. Publishing a photograph to a website doesn't confer any rights to anyone who downloads the photo to modify or sell it. That is why there are licenses such as the Creative Commons and so forth. If you don't have specific written permission to use it then technically you shouldn't use it. Would using a downloaded photograph get you sued? Not likely unless you use something that is clearly the property of a professional photographer and even then they are more likely to ask for a licensing fee than sue you. In fact, they would most likely prefer you keep using their images and pay the fee - that way they get some revenue from it. It costs them money to sue as well.
If you took the photograph yourself it is yours to do with pretty much whatever you want, with consideration of the restriction in use for advertising purposes and even that can often be a tough fight for a corporation. For example, if I photograph a city skyline that happens to include a Microsoft logo on a building and I use it to advertise air fresheners, it would be tough for Microsoft to make me stop using it. However, Microsoft has a tad more money than I do and their attempt to make me stop would bankrupt me, win or lose.
The sim uses the names and logos of existing corporations (Airbus, Boeing, Cessna, etc.) almost certainly by arrangement with those corporations. Asobo have been careful not to use other corporate names and logos in scenery (check out the Alaska hangar at SeaTac) not, I suspect, because they think they can't use those logos but just to avoid any hassle. The airline where I work jealously guard the company logo, but if someone used it in MSFS (someone already has) they would almost certainly choose to ignore it provided the use was benign. However, if the publisher asked permission they would most likely be told no, you can't use it that way.
Tricky old world, innit?
