A: After a complaint from the U.K. Hydrographic Office and the subsequent discovery that country-by-country permissions are now required to use harmonic constants (data needed to predict tides), the distributions of data that spanned many countries (all of the data originating with the International Hydrographic Office or the Table des Marées des Grands Ports du Monde) were removed from the harmonics files.

Back in the old days, the collection of hydrographic data was done almost exclusively using public funds.  The resulting harmonic constants were treated as scientific results, published, and distributed on request from an international data bank.  But in the late 20th century, a wave of privatizations occurred, and harmonic constants became the intellectual property of the collecting agencies.

You wouldn't think it possible to "un-publish" data that was distributed with considerable freedom at one time.  Nevertheless, at this time the international data bank is no more, the Table des Marées des Grands Ports du Monde has been withdrawn from publication, and we have been forced to remove the associated data from the harmonics files.

For my own part, I do not consider privatization to be inherently evil.  It would have been reasonable to keep newly generated data secret while leaving the old data in the public domain until it became useless from age.  But in my opinion it was wrong to lay claim to the old data that was once shared in the spirit of scientific openness.  It was a disservice and dishonor to all of us who accepted and used that data on good faith, and donated our own time to maintain it and add value to it, only to end up accused of copyright infringement.