Slashdot Mirror
Time Zone Database Has New Home After Lawsuit
networkBoy writes "ICANN has taken stewardship of the time zone database after its original operators were sued for copyright infringement by an astrology software company, saying they will 'deal with any legal matters as they arise'. From the article: 'Without this database and others like it, computers would display Greenwich Mean Time, or the time in London when it isn't on summer time. People would have to manually calculate local time when they schedule meetings or book flights.'"
I'm sorry, patents? This issue involves copyrights .
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I immediately went out and filed a patent on "noon". Sorry folks, we're first to file now... you snooze you lose.
Good for you, but I already copyrighted it.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
ICANN is the same group of idiots who decided in spite of numerous objections that selling gTLDs - and giving away all the rights and responsibilities for them - was a good idea. These guys don't have the best interest of anyone other than themselves in mind, and will probably sell this off to the highest bidder in a matter of months.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You can certainly do this for your local time zone. If you're booking a flight elsewhere, you can't see the clocks in that time zone.
The database in question is just a list of what everybody around the world would type in.
It's not semantics, it's two completely different areas of law. It's as different as condemning Mac desktops as being insecure virus magnets when you actually meant Windows desktops, and then when someone calls you out on it, pleading "oh, semantics police!" as a valid defence.
That's not what the TZ database contains. It has city/country to timezone mapping, but it also has historical information. Timezones change, daylight savings time changes. The TZ database contains all that. That's why it is useful.
This lawsuit is a no-brainer. Time zone data would without a doubt be an unoriginal database, meaning that under Feist v. Rural, it isn't eligible for copyright in the US.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
And while we're at it, let's switch to metric clocks.
we can all just switch to stardate now!
No, the differences here are very important. Unoriginal data isn't eligible for copyright, but a method for handling data could be, at least in lower courts. Also, copyright has independent conception as a defense, while patents do not.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Can everyone just update the Wikipedia entry for your city with timezone information? It would be nice if it were in an easy to recognize format along with LAT/LONG position so this can all be scraped into a database via software.
It's not semantics, it's two completely different areas of law. It's as different as condemning Mac desktops as being insecure virus magnets when you actually meant Windows desktops, and then when someone calls you out on it, pleading "oh, semantics police!" as a valid defence.
Intellectual laziness always tries to assert its own validity.
It leads to strange behaviors. For example, the afflicted will usually prefer to make themselves look stupid by trying to convince you that an obvious glaring error is somehow not an error, rather than admit they made a mistake like human beings tend to do from time to time. I guess they think they're fooling anyone.
The sentiment seems to be, "how dare you expect me to know the most basic things about a subject prior to taking a position on it?! I mean really, who do you think you are?" In a way, it's amusing. In another way, it's really pathetic.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Not a very good example of the importance of that database. It includes historic values, not only the current offset, that historic information is extremely useful. If you only have the current offset, applications has no way to know for example: what day is 20*365*24*60*60 seconds ago? and no, the answer is not exactly 20 year ago (ignoring leap years) because timezone changes means that not all days are 24 hours
Or make dollar signs light up in their eyes. I hope it's the latter, because that will hopefully do to them what similar crap did to SCO.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
.
When are we going to start burning all the Astrologists as Witches?
This lawsuit would seem to be ample provocation.
.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
I was traveling through South America for a month, hit most of the major countries. It's bigger than you think. Five countries in four weeks is a lot. Anyways, I was using Ubuntu (9.10 UNR) and Gmail on a netbook to handle most of my affairs while I was out of the country.
I'm not sure what it was exactly, either the system clock or on google's end, but when I crossed from Brazil in to Uruguay, my system clock, gmail and gcalendar got royally screwed up, to the point that I was 3 hours early to my international ferry, and despite being an hour "early" to the airport on my trip home, I barely made my flight by 10 minutes.
I doubt many people have much use for a calendar system that auto-updates the correct time depending on country/timezone you're in on a regular basis, but if your calendar says "4pm local time" and then changes it six times based on where you're viewing it, and screws up, it can be disastrous and very costly. I'm sure that's an outlier problem, but having a standardized database might give developers more time to work on kinks like what I experienced.
For the record, yes I own and wear a watch, but pilots don't always give you the local time when you land, and not always in English(!). Free wifi in airports is a blessing, but when your computer doesn't know what the actual time is, it can cause scheduling problems, especially when you're trying to catch a connecting/transfer flight.
Long story short, time zones screwed up my computer and took almost a week of use stateside before it sorted itself out again.
moox. for a new generation.
Will I finally be able to buy my own vanity timezone for $200,000?
Actually in this universe not all days are the same length...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
Hmm, I don't think that the (non-US) governments whose countries use those gTLDs were really keen for them to be controlled from the US...
What you are referring to are ccTLDs, which are different from gTLDs. gTLDs are the non-country domains, such as .com, .net, .mobi or .aero.
Many authentication protocols use GMT to time stamp the tokens as to reduce the chance of replay attacks.
If it's 11:00 your time and 1:00 someone else's time, you need to convert them into a standard time. GMT being that time. If GMT was copyrighted, and you couldn't use it, then many authentication protocols would break.
Effectively, timezone calculations would be outlawed.
Time zones have nothing to do with how long a day is.
The "TZ database" definition of a time zone is different from the definition of time zone used in many other contexts. It is defined as "any national region where local clocks have all agreed since 1970".
The relationship between local time in a given region and universal time can change for a number of reasons including regular daylight savings changes*, DST rule changes, changes depending on the governments view of the relative important of consistencey with local time vs consistency with neighbouring jurisdictions. Changes in who has jurisdiction over a given area and so on. Tracking these historical changes is nessacery if you want to accurately convert historic local time into universal time or universal time into historic local time.
* And these rules are NOT a simple case of "on day x of month y". In particular it is common to fix the change to a particular day of the week. For example the european rule is last sundays in march and october. The north american rule is second sunday in march and first sunday in november. Some places like israel have even more complex rules revolving around religious events.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The key word there being 'should.' Unfortunately, reality doesn't reflect that.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
...unless some of the numbers are intentionally wrong, as markers. Then *those* are fiction, and (some would argue) eligible for copyright protection.
Remember the old practice of cartographers adding fictitious details that would be unique to their work - same deal, in theory. If a rival's map had those features, it would be a slam dunk infringement.
I have no clue if such elements were present in the TZ list, however.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
as other people have replied to you, Timezone changes have a relationship with day length, some changes are not DST based, In my country we switched a few years back from UTC-4 to UTC-4.5 (we were at UTC-4.5 in 1960 IIRC) those changes are sometimes politically motivated and unrelated to a yearly DST switch. The day the switch was done it was not a 24 hours day and that affect all date related calculation that cross that day
The URL at ICANN seems to be http://www.iana.org/time-zones
Just for sake of completeness, not all timezone changes are in increments of an hour. There are multiple that do half hour, some do two hours, and I've seen quarter hours.
You seem to be arguing that the authors can have a copyright on it because they worked so hard on it. It doesn't matter if they put a billion manhours into it, because US copyright is based on originality, not the sweat of the brow doctrine. That's why I mentioned Feist v. Rural.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
ICANN is not taking over maintenance of the timezone database. The plan has been for a long time to maintain it under the IANA.
While technically the IANA is part of ICANN, they are still quite distinct. I have nothing but respect for the IANA, while I have nothing but disdain for ICANN (the policy organization). The difference? ICANN's board is not able to meddle with IANA, or the IAB (Internet Architecture Board) would designate a new IANA. Without the IANA, ICANN could only set, but not enforce policy, and the US Government would terminate the contract with ICANN. The result would be the death of ICANN.
The timezone database will continue to be maintained by an IETF designated expert, not by an ICANN policy committee. The internet draft (draft-lear-iana-timezone-database-04) has been approved for publication as an RFC, and the IANA has now implemented its side as per the standard RFC publication process. The IANA time-zone page remains unofficial until the RFC is published, but its already a done deal.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I should also note that the database is currently being maintained by Robert Elz, in the absence of a formally appointed TZ Coordinator. IANA has effectively accepted him as interim TZ Coordinator[1] by they way of adopting the release he made on October 10 as the initial IANA published tzdata file.
[1] Until a formal TZ Coordinator is chosen by mailing list consensus and confirmed by the IESG, as per the as yet unpublished RFC.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
While this is in a sense true,
It is usually said that tabulated (scientific) data can not be copyrighted.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame