Tide Clocks / Tidal Prediction - Can the Crown really copyright UK tidal prediction?!

[Mr. X]

I was just looking for a software tide clock to keep track of my favourite locations and came across this:

WXTide32 - Tides and Currents for Win9x/NT

WXTide32 - FAQs includes this:

"What happened to the England (and Ireland and Scotland) tide data?
With the release of version 4.0, there are now harmonic constituent data for 44 stations in U.K., Ireland and Scotland. While not as extensive as was previously available, at least there are now some ports for that area. ...

In 2001, I was notified by the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) that the Crown claimed copyright ownership of all tidal products for Great Britain, Ireland and Scotland. ...when the International Hydrographic Office (IHO) disbanded in 1999, tidal data ownership reverted to individual countries and the blanket approval IHO gave for non-commercial use of world-wide tidal data was rescinded. Since Great Britain has now claimed copyright ownership, other countries may follow suit. This means that only tidal data for countries that have explicitly released their data to public domain may be used free of risk of copyright infringement. Data for the U.S. is not a problem. That data was gathered using public (taxpayer) funds so no copyright is or can be attached to NOS or NOA tidal data. Likewise, tidal data gathered by the U.S. in other countries and published by them is free of copyright restrictions. But that still leaves lots of world and the database distributed with WXTide32 starting with version 2.7 shows that new greatly reduced area of coverage."

It strikes me that tidal data gather in the UK will also have been done at tax payers expense. So where's our free access? (Also, how can you copyright "all tidal products"?!)

BTW the Frequently Asked Questions page also mentions an updated UNIX version that can be incorporated into websites

[Mr. X]

Interesting product for PC & pocketPC/smartphone for one reasonable price: www.TidePlotter.com

[Mr. X]

£5 phone download with tide information: ashortwalk mobiletide | tide times on your mobile phone

[Old Man Dave]

I designed and built my own tide clock a few years ago. I used some CAD/CAM to create a circuit board with a programmable chip. For the display I used 12 LED's on a clock face. I wrote a load of programmes but in the end I could only make it work with the simple yearly average time shift from high to low tide, divided into a the twice daily range. This is the principle of the tide clocks you can buy with the modified quartz mechanism driving the hands.

What I really wanted to create was a programme to mimic the exact tide with the variations of springs and neaps etc. The averaging out effect means errors of up to 2 hours on any set day. However my programmable chip simply didn't have the memory to accept the level of data needed. Plus there were a lot of other issues regarding power managemant, interuption of the programme, date as well as time functions and problems with resets and start up.

Eventually gave up and moved on to programable music chips, before giving it all up as a bad job and moving on to makinf FOM trophies and actually going diving now and then.

Still got my tide clock though and it still has its uses plus it looks rather nice and works well for what it is.

Dave