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

"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reverted to individual countries and the blanket approval IHO gave for non-commercial use of world-wide tidal data was rescinded.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."

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