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Partisan politics aside, frankly, anything data the government publishes like this should be public domain by virtue of it being published by the government.

How can the government "for the people by the people" claim propriety/intellectual-property over anything?

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Anything the US government publishes directly is in the public domain, including the contents of climate.gov, when it was online. One of the reasons the migration could happen without legal repercussions is precisely because the information was public domain.

From the article:

> This is possible because US government data is public domain by law.

From the FAQ on the new climate.us [0]:

> Can I re-use this data/product/image/video?

> Yes! Any content dated prior to June 30, 2025 and credited to NOAA Climate.gov is in the public domain can be freely re-used with proper attribution.

> Any content after June 30, 2025 and credited to Climate.us, is under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

[0] https://www.climate.us/faqs


> Any content dated prior to June 30, 2025 and credited to NOAA Climate.gov is in the public domain [and] can be freely re-used with proper attribution.

What a bizarre thing to say. It's in the public domain. Why would you need attribution?


Yeah, that is odd. Maybe a mistake?

I don't think this is what's going on here but CC0 was expressly created because not every jurisdiction had a concept of "public domain", so a special license was needed to make sure it acted as if it were in the public domain for those cases.

From a CC0 FAQ [0]:

> Do I have to attribute the person who applied CC0 to their work?

> No, there is no legal requirement that you attribute the affirmer ...

From a Berlin Universities Publishing FAQ [1]:

> ... Since a waiver of copyright protection is not possible under German copyright law, CC0 is equivalent to a waiver of all possible rights and legal claims by the creator.

But, regardless, public domain or CC0 doesn't need attribution whether it's in the US or Germany.

[0] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_is_the_di...

[1] https://www.berlin-universities-publishing.de/en/beratung/li...


> Why would you need attribution?

Many Bothans died, or even worse were fired, to bring us this information

A little appreciation to the people that were prosecuted just for being scientists, vomiting at the sea all day long, would be a nice detail.




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