Topic: Proprietary Ownership of Weather Station data

[Newcastle_Weathership]

This is more of a legal question than a technical one. 

Like many, I feed data wx data to various sites. My DI VP II+ and Livelink feed data directly to MADIS via CWOP. I also have a Meteobridge hub (virtualized on a ProxMox VM) that aggregates the DI station and a number of Ecowitt sensors. The data from the Meteobridge feeds the usual array of weather networks known to most of you.

I recently added PWS Weather to my upload list, primarily to gain access to their API; everything looked fine, and data was uploading as usual. I returned to PWS Weather today to find a nastygram placed on my station dashboard; my station was suspected of being a duplicate, and my data was blocked from their system. Further investigation revealed that another station (AX088) was mapped to the exact same GPS coordinates. Well, that makes sense since AX088 is my MADIS Station Identifier. Even more interesting, PWS displays sensor data that was never sent to MADIS, so they are swiping my Meteobridge data from somewhere and mapping it to the "MADIS" station.
 
This brings up the point, who "owns" the weather data and reporting stations?  I understand that networks I choose to join are granted the rights to display my data and station information, but what about for-profit companies that buy/obtain data from third parties or governmental agencies?    In my case, AerisWeather (dba PWSWeather) has ingested MADIS weather data and displays my station (marked as MADIS) on their web products.   While I am not accusing Aeris or any other Wx Network aggregator/portal of anything nefarious, it does raise questions about one's ability to control their station location and data.    For example, I freely provide MADIS with my station data, and they can aggregate and deliver the anonymous aggregated data to other networks. However, are the 'for-profit' networks allowed to de-aggregate the data and display individual weather stations without the owners' consent?

In my case, I cannot create a station in PWS Weather because MADIS virtually "owns" my station and has granted PWS consent to display it on their products. 

Thanks!
Brian, AA5H, AX088

[DaleReid]

The closest I can come to anything similar is in photos taken by anyone, professional or amateur.

In general, from reading photo mags and on line blogs, the photo and it's copyright belong to the photographer.

I'm not sure how it works when if you upload a picture of some weather event to a TV station where a disclaimer says it will use your photo as it sees fit, but generally does not say it will take the  photo as it's own.

May be some do.

I'm also interested in this question you raise since I wonder how much benefit they get from eager citizens wishing to share their data, for free, and all we ask is to view it or have it where we want to put it. 

There is a lot of time and money we put into having good quality stations and thanks to the internet, can share these data every few seconds to every hour or so.  Years ago local airports who may have some staffing part time by FAA would send data of their hourly observations, and that was an amazing source for those pilots to check that data, for free.  The FAA wanted as up to date pilots with current conditions as we could get for safe flight.

So why are these companies trying to claim your data?  If they are paying you for it, that is one thing.  If they are charging others for it, I wonder if the 'others' being chcarged are aware that these data are privately contributed and have no verification? 

This is one reason I vigorously opposed the privatization of the weather service, along with many other government provided, for free, services to citizens. 

[Tln7559]

When you sign up for contributing of your meteo data to an organisation at entry you always have to accept their T&Cs.
Like you always do before downloading software, you have to carefully read & agree the clauses of the agreement, and then you can say yes or no .........

Not exhaustive, but as result you have seen & understood in the T&Cs of XWeather, WUnderground and other commercial weather organisations that you have granted reuse of your data for other application and for further distribution, usually in very weak and very legal terms ......
CWOP is clear in T&Cs, but an exception that it trusts it's contributors in good faith.
Weatherflow is very open that the contributed data is commercially exploited and is fed to NOAA, NWS and many others.
Weatherlink is also getting commercial: their cloudwebsite is now all you get as payback.
As example in Europe, WOW via MetOfficeUK is very clear that they feed to various national meteo-organisations, without any reward to the contributor.
Some have a ContributorPlan, like XWeather and WUnderground, enabling you to read via API the data from own station and from other stations.
Other organisations just tell you that you are allowed to see the resulting, compiled pictures & lists as reward.

Some amateurs do not want their data distributed beyond a first destination, as they have choosen.
This background is also reason that some amateur websites only allow the contributor after login to take selective copy of data (for backup), and nobody else.
The careful organisations even do not have an interface for reading or for transfer of data.
For more leisurely contributors, some amateurwebsites in Europe in their member-setup have a menu in which the contributor can set which other organisations are permitted to have a data-copy as controlled, derivative next step, with available choices usually linking to comparably 'conservative' organisations.

As afterthought, you can see that uploading your data to various organisations can have (not so) 'funny' consequences.
As own example, having several PWSes at one location:
- uploading to CWOP, see my station data appearing at MADIS and as consequence in XWeather
(fortunately no blocking yet by XWeather for the direct upload from another, colocated PWS)
- having a Weatherflow_Tempest to be expected that similarly my station appears in several maps
- for air quality some organisations just grab data without asking: worst example is https://aqicn.org/here/.