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The data this company has put behind a paywall is the european weather model, which was developed with tax payer money, is run with tax payer money, and the data of which is almost entirely available for free to anyone that wants to access the data.

Companies like the one that posted this take down notice actually sued (!) the national weather services in a few EU countries to prevent national weather services from publishing weather data to consumers for free, arguing that the weather service should run free APIs, but these companies should be able to build ad and subscription supported apps using these free APIs.

https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020...

All these companies did was build a fence around it and charge a fee. How does that even reach the necessary threshold of originality for copyright?



Because they built the app... They aren't copyrighting the data. They're copyrighting their app.


An app that's a thin wrapper around public data.

Apps like this have sued the public weather services in multiple EU countries to take down the official apps, e.g., https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020...

Fuck private weather apps.


> Apps like this have sued the public weather services in multiple EU countries to take down the official apps, e.g., https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020...

Very important note here. The DWD was found by the highest court in Germany to be acting illegally.


I'm arguing that the law itself is wrong here.

I don't see any value in dozens of different, bad, private apps rehashing the same weather report data.

That the law values the rights of those companies to rent-seek higher than the right of citizens to be informed is extremely dangerous. The same reasoning could be applied to news, laws, or even firefighting.

Some services should just be provided by the state and not by private companies.




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