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Responding to an email like that has basically no possible benefits for the person running the balloon tracking website, but it does introduce the possibility of some fool paying their lawyer to add you as a respondent in a lawsuit. Costing you many thousands of dollars at minimum in legal fees and travel even if you get the court to remove you from the case. Never respond to something like that unless your lawyer, whom you pay has instructed you to.

A person like that sending inquiries to website/API operators demanding data, ignore it. Always. Continue to ignore it until a process server actually shows up on your doorstep and serves you, in which case you know they're at least moderately serious, and then you need to engage your own counsel to deal with it.

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Or maybe the sonde continued transmitting and they have data on where the guy took it which would help ID him.
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Or if they'd been foolish enough to log the recovery on sondehub itself, which some of us do frequently (but not after causing property damage!).
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Fair, I guess, I just can’t imagine what it’s like getting all these weird requests and demands for a hobby project. Hopefully the author is more entertained than I would be.
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Not a lawyer but as a citizen I generally understand that the courts expect demands from court parties to be met.

If meeting the court's (or court parties') demands costs you something you are generally entitled to charge them for it, within reason and with justification.

As a hobbyist therefore putting a service offering page together with your preferred rate probably helps establish the nature and parameters of any such service.

Bill rates / piece rates, especially, and setting up bounds of what is reasonable to expect, in proportion to your gig and your intended effort level.

Quantity and price tiers, turnaround times, what will be included in the deliverable, how it will be delivered, SLAs, etc.

Whatever defines your service, esp as it relates to the types of requests you end up getting.

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If I start listing prices, I may need to ensure that I have a business entity set up for tax purposes and to guard against liability. Especially if I’m listing SLAs.

This is not a hobby, it’s a job.

This is why all my hobbies are dark web projects, these days.

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You only need to have a business entity (which, to be fair, can be yourself, although liability concerns apply) once you're about to actually enter into a contract with someone.

Merely listing prices (without an associated automated payment form which could imply a contract was en force upon successful payment) doesn't actually force you to do business with anyone. It would however 1) deter requests for unpaid work by giving them an idea of what it would cost to get what they're looking for and 2) give you an idea of the demand for said services and could give you a warm lead which you can then choose to pursue formally by getting the necessary business structure, legal/business advice, etc.

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> Merely listing prices (without an associated automated payment form which could imply a contract was en force upon successful payment) doesn't actually force you to do business with anyone.

In some cases it could. If you want to say "we categorically don't do X for ethical reasons", that can sometimes be more easily defensible in a way that "we have a standard price for doing this, but we don't want to do it for you in particular" may be harder to defend. (Even though I think both should always be possible.)

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