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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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When are we going to start burning all the Astrologists as Witches?
This lawsuit would seem to be ample provocation.
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"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Actually in this universe not all days are the same length...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
In Leonard Hofstadter's voice "please don't ask that please don't ask that oh crap, you asked that. We'll never make it to the movie now."
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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
That's fine for converting current times but for comparing an historical time to the current time you need to know if there have been any timezone changes. That's what this whole thing is about.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
The URL at ICANN seems to be http://www.iana.org/time-zones
The database is more than just "what time is it in New York City?". It's also useful for answering questions like "On June 15, 1988 at 13:00 UTC, what time was showing on the clocks in Riyadh?".
(That particular question is why the zoneinfo entry for Saudi Arabia is almost ten times the size of any other entry.)
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.