To be fair, I think that the jury is still out on how to handle "AI" hallucinations in terms of copyright, as evidenced by the battles going on in Hollywood right now, or emerging commotions in the gaming industry. That much should be clear though: the precedent-setting decision won't be made on the basis of EuroGA vs. airfield.directory PIREPs :)

I am not even talking about copyright for AI content – im general small fact based little texts like these pilot reports do not qualify for "copyright". No court will be interested in dealing with this stuff.

You cannot control where "AI" scrapes its semi-garbage from. The moment this project receives a credible legal threat it will have to pack up. Then everybody contributing will have wasted their time.

Let's ask the Defendant:

Building your own site with pilot reports and want AI to collect content only from certain sources.

Here’s how that works in practice:

Yes, you can restrict AI to specific sites.

If you tell me “only use EuroGA.net and Pilots of America, never AOPA or Reddit”, then I can be directed to search or scrape only those whitelisted sites.

How it’s done technically:

When fetching fresh info, you (or a developer) set the AI/web crawler to query only those domains.
Example: a search like site:euroga.org "PIREP" ensures only EuroGA is searched.

You can also exclude others using -site:aopa.org.

********

This does not mean that it "should be done", but technically it is absolutely possible, And the risk is small, because the fact based content of PIREPS (especially when re-written by the AI) can hardly be "copyrighted".

This does not work. LLMs disregard robots.txt etc etc.

The whole LLM copyright debate is regarding this. If LLM scrapers respected these controls, they would be almost useless. They would just be a "better google".

Anyway, doing this would be admitting that specific sources are targeted because they have the quality data Rockhopper is looking for ;)

I have not tried it.

The AI-generated summaries posted on Airfield Directory are legally completely fine for several reasons: they do not consist of copied texts but only of facts expressed in new wording:

• Facts such as fees, PPR rules, phone numbers, or typical wind conditions are not protected by copyright and may be freely shared.
• The texts are not taken 1:1 from databases but are automatically reformulated. This means they do not infringe copyright protection.
• The AI-generated texts themselves are freely usable, including commercially, according to the AI-provider.

Apart from that:

• The copyright of a PIREP always lies with the author, i.e. the person who wrote the text, and not with the forum in which it was published. The forum or its operator has at most the usage rights defined in its terms and conditions (e.g. for displaying or archiving posts) – if such rules exist at all. It does not thereby become the copyright holder. Copyright remains with the writer, not the forum – and a fact-based summary does not violate this right. If, nevertheless, an individual airfield operator or author (but not a forum operator) feels their copyright or other rights have been infringed, the procedure for notice & takedown is set out in the Terms of Service, section 14.
• I would like to remind everybody that under Article 20 of the GDPR, every author also has a right to ask the service operator to export their own data in a machine-readable format, which applies to forums as well.

Every forum by the way is free to attribute and import PIREPs from Airfield Directory.

The claim “The moment this project receives a credible legal threat it will have to pack up. Then everybody contributing will have wasted their time” is of course just Trump-style fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Because the posted PIREPs on Airfield Directory are Creative Commons and are regularly exported, they remain free forever, entirely independent of the continued existence of Airfield Directory. This seems, however, to be very difficult for some minds to grasp.

We have now exceeded 2300 reports - all real pilot reports, with details like prices, etc, and all without the use of "AI".

Wir haben inzwischen die Marke von 2300 Berichten überschritten – allesamt echte Berichte von Piloten, mit Details wie Preisen usw., und das ganz ohne den Einsatz von „AI“.

How about the translation in German of the sentence in English? It reads like LLM to me ;-)

And all proprietary to u, Right?

Unfortunately with a horrible user interface

I used google to translate into German, yes :)

EuroGA is a pan-European pilot community. We have been going since 2012. Around 8000 pilots have joined. The airport database belongs to EuroGA. I believe this has been discussed here before :) The main German one, eddh.de, belongs to eddh.de, etc.

The EuroGA airport database

https://airports.euroga.org/

is open to all to contribute. You can contribute as a Guest so no need for a EuroGA login.

I am writing this in English so that the bad German translation is avoided.

Example EGPE:

Skydemon 18

eddh.de 15

Foreflight 1

Euroga 1

EGPE (Inverness, Scotland) is an interesting example. Please check the dates of the reports and where from. It is now very expensive (in the region of €300) and apart from an aeroclub there, there is very little GA activity

https://www.euroga.org/forums/trips-airports/17211-scotland-recommendations/post/412221#412221

There are many more reports on our airport database from mainland Europe (EU etc) than from the UK :) We have many contributors from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, etc...

Simply not correct.

Check this please:

https://www.hial.co.uk/downloads/file/1110/inverness-airport-charges-effective-1-april-2026

Inverness is a great airport and GA friendly.

EuroGA is a pan-European pilot community. We have been going since 2012. Around 8000 pilots have joined. The airport database belongs to EuroGA. I believe this has been discussed here before :) The main German one, eddh.de, belongs to eddh.de, etc.

And no one minds you offering a forum and some other perks for the interested pilot community. But: Better is the enemy of good. And you constantly dodge the relevant question: Why shall one contribute to a proprietary platform, if by now there is a free, new database that you or any commercial service may use since the interface allows what a grass root approach by all concerned aviators share: Usability for everyone.

The EuroGA airport database

https://airports.euroga.org/

is open to all to contribute. You can contribute as a Guest so no need for a EuroGA login.

Yep. But it's proprietary. Better is the enemy of good.

What is your business continuity plan? Could others use the content? What provisions did you install for a going concern?

We are all aware of what happens when an OEM goes bankrupt, if parts dry up, product recalls, small numbers are manufactured etc. Pilots aren't stupid (but not always wise, I give you that). So, why should we contribute when an open source volunteer project with free access interface provisions exists today?

You will dodge this core question, cuz it stings. Doesn't it?

EuroGA has a great continuity plan. It is a community; not a personal business of any one person. It does not generate a penny of revenue for anyone.

Example: For how many years have you contributed to eddh.de? That is owned by one man who has refused all pressure to do what you are asking for. And I am not surprised!

Experience shows that most people stop contributing once a "cause" becomes unfocused.

Peter, the dodger.

Again: I have zero beef with EuroGA. Very useful. Great to have. But all u offer here is Whataboutism, cuz I poked at the right spot. Answer for yourself, do not deflect to EDDH.DE.

Or give the resource to everyone, free of charge, as a common good.

Peter,

as you addressed me directly, I am happy to answer.

First, congratulations on 2300 reports.

Although - by your own standard, the number shouldn't impress anyone too much. When you launched this thread in 2020, you dismissed the established databases because - and I quote - "most of the data is really quite old" and old reports are "almost useless". I agree. Which makes recency the only currency that counts.

Your own posts put EuroGA at 2000 last August and 2300 now - roughly 300 added in its sixth year, with thousands of members. Airfield Directory added 970 handwritten reports in the same twelve months, from a standing start - counting one report per pilot per airfield, with the constant stream of updates to existing reports not counted at all. Last month alone: over 70 new ones, plus dozens of refreshed ones. Because our philosophy is that pilots update their report instead of stacking a new one on top, every airfield shows the current state, not an archaeology expedition.

And since we're calling things "real pilot reports, with details": a casual browse through your 2300 turns up entries whose complete text is "Ok", "Nil" or "Good". Those count toward the 2300 too.

Speaking of "details like prices": on Airfield Directory, landing fees and fuel prices don't depend on what a pilot remembered to type into a text box months ago. They come straight from the airfields' own Aerops data (another service that focuses on collaboration for the benefit of the community) - maintained by the airfields themselves, including personalised landing fees and forms e.g. for PPR. As a backup, we publish community prices from another open community project with an open API, aviation-fuel-prices.com, if they're no older than 30 days. So our prices are current by construction, not by luck. Same applies to information like customs/border crossing points, which is fetched and parsed directly from the official sources.

And to calm your AI phobia: not a single AI-generated report has been added beyond the clearly-badged launch set from a year ago. Zero AI texts since launch; pilots wrote 970. By hand. But here is what our AI DOES do: it translates every report into six languages, so a French pilot writes in French and you read it in English - something neither a German-only nor an English-only database offers a pan-European community, which we both value. There's even a human-only-no-AI nightly export.

All that exists precisely because the data in Airfield Directory is open and it belongs to the people who contributed it - the community.

What remains is the actual difference between the projects. For the record: I first invited you to cooperate by personal email in March 2021 - on your terms, even offering to keep EuroGA's data out of the API and download entirely if you preferred. You never replied.

I repeated the offer in this thread last August. It still stands: all our reports are CC BY-SA, with an open API, nightly full export, ForeFlight content packs, and an MCP server for Claude & ChatGPT. You're welcome to integrate every single one into EuroGA, with attribution, today - and you and/or your contributors are equally welcome to republish their own reports with us.

One of these two databases has had a locked door for five years now. It isn't ours.

In the spirit of peaceful coexistence, I returned the courtesy you extended this forum in 2020 and posted an introduction of Airfield Directory on EuroGA. I'm genuinely curious how long it stays up. [UPDATE: Less than 2 minutes.]

Hello Thomas

You were on EuroGA before, as Berlinflyer (same here). You were contributing nicely to our community but eventually for some reason arranged to get yourself banned by making posts with lots of four-letter words, despite warnings about it. You then changed your ID here to RockhopperFlyer - this is visible to all if one hovers the mouse over "Rockhopper".

The post you made just now on EuroGA was deleted immediately due to a number of spammer activity signatures.

Incidentally, does anyone know what happened to Achim? Last post on PUF in June.

Whataboutism and dodging.

Peter, you created a nice forum. Why sully your own rep? Isn''t it all about flying and choosing hospitable aerodromes as destinations? Or am I missing something?

Don't stoop too low. It might tell a story about yourself you might not be proud of.(I just read up some older thread on EuroGA today, incidentally. It shouldn't be too hard to acknowledge we all botch landings every once in a while..).

> The post you made just now on EuroGA was deleted immediately due to a number of spammer activity signatures.

So it was an accidental automated deletion, and it will be restored? I wasn't fast enough to have seen the post to judge for myself.

AIRFIELD DIRECTORY is by far the best website of this kind.

In diesem Forum wird ein Werbebeitrag für Euroga toleriert. Im Euroga Forum für Airfield.directory zu sprechen würde hingegen genauso schnell ohne Notiz gelöscht werden wie Beiträge zu vielen anderen Themen auch, die dem Inhaber nicht passen.

Natürlich, Mr. Holly (so heißt er eigentlich) löscht alles sofort, das ihm nicht gefällt oder seine private Agenda nicht unterstützt. Und mich hasst er echt mit Leidenschaft ... weil ich ihm gern widersprochen habe. Und am schlimmsten: Ich habe mich lustig gemacht ;-) ;-) .... Das ist zehn Jahre her, aber so was wie "vergessen wir den Quatsch" kennt er nicht.