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Comment by PatrickTulskie | Hacker News Reader

There was this whole thing with that here in NY with the MTA. They were claiming that their time tables are copyrighted, but after it went in/out of courts it was determined that only the complied versions are and then they opened up their data files for developers. The time a train arrives and departs does not fall under copyright. I'm not sure how things are in the UK but I'd expect them to be fairly similar.

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Some lawyer friends have advised me of the same here in Ireland*

I'd be happy to have someone with some authority in Dublin Bus even notice it though!

* we're not in the UK ;)

Semi-related: about a week after I had moved to Dublin from the US I made an offhand remark in a shop about being in the UK and was very quickly corrected. I quickly learned my lesson and have moved on to other cultural mistakes. :-)

Haha sorry about that. I thought I saw someone else in the comments talking about the UK and got thrown off.

Similar or not, a lot of very highly-paid lawyers would love to argue over this for weeks.

My general argument is this whole situation is not as clear-cut and black-and-white as the developer in question asserts, however ‘moral’ or justified his objection to second developer’s seemingly less defensible actions in copying his work.

There seems little ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ here, just very subtle shades of grey and legal interpretation of who owns which rights to various elements of data, code, design and structure.

Dublin is the capital city of Eire.

You are only technically correct. Eire is the Irish name for Ireland, but is not commonly used in English. In Ireland, everyone calls Ireland Ireland. Similarly, the language is Irish, not Gaelic. You only hear the words "Eire" and "Gaelic" used outside Ireland, typically in America (except for the small section of the population who actually speak Irish).

If you were to use the Irish term Eire, then it would make sense to use the Irish name for Dublin, which is Baile Atha Cliath, or Dubh Linn, depending.

I'm not sure this is correct, but I had the impression that "Eire" in English was used to talk about the island of Ireland.

I think this is something I just sort of picked up though -- so it's entirely possible I'm totally out to lunch.

Mor elike the oppsoite. Ireland is the whole island and Eire is the Republic of Ireland. It also depends on one's politics. Londonderry or Derry ? My t-shirt says "People's Republic of Derry", though round here it gets mis-read as "People's Republic of Derby" which is a neighbouring city!

Being technically correct is all I hope for. As an Englishman I always write Eire but say Ireland.

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