The new definition of a Pyrrhic victory:
The company WeatherOnline had sued the German weather service for their smartphone app, because it offered information for free, that according to the recent changes of the law (in favor of companies like WeatherOnline, BTW) should only be sold at neutral costs.
Well, now the DWD App costs 2€ once for the professional version (which had 5 million users in Germany) and many people are ranting against Weather Online, not the DWD... paying for an app is suddenly considered some kind of confused civil resistance it seems, Also the poor quality of the WeatherOnline reports is now getting a lot more focus.
Could you imagine somebody sueing the NOAA because they want to make money with the data that the NOAA offers for free?
Meh...around here it's a monopoly. You don't really get weather companies, since they're all required to buy their data from the national weather services, and certification is a bureaucratic hell and costs a fortune. Otherwise, it's illegal to issue forecasts, even if you're a trained forecaster. Recently , they tried taking on accuweather and other services because they offer weather data in our country (WTF).
The second biggest problem is that their data is expensive and sometimes crap. It's a shame to rely on hungarian and serbian radars when chasing because our public radar was updating every half an hour, a pro subscription service doesn't exist and if you managed to reach an agreement with them to get the radar data real time, it would cost an arm and a leg.
The shadier thing is when they charge for data that is freely available internationally. A friend of mine was making a study about fish migration, and he had to have daily temp averages for a year at several stations across the country. They literally asked for something like 300 euros for that data. Here's the catch: those stations were also emitting in the international data stream, so you could literally get that data for free from the world meteorological organization (ogimet) website.
