
Time-zone database used by Unix shut down due to IP litigation - mcantelon
http://blog.joda.org/2011/10/today-time-zone-database-was-closed.html
======
dendory
Every day we see bat-shit-crazy lawsuits over patents and trademarks that have
a huge impact on society, for no good reason but corporate greed. If the
company follows through it means any computer system that lists possible time
zones would be at risk since the original data came from a source that this
company bought. Not surprised one bit by this.

~~~
jtwb
Publicly held corporations are greedy by definition. The objective of such a
corporation is simply to make as much money for its owners as possible.

Our laws create an environment where intellectual property abuse has proven to
be a profitable venture.

The solution is not to redefine corporations as non-greedy entities.

~~~
kevinh
Not necessarily. Generally, the purpose of a corporation is, in fact, to
maximize shareholder wealth, but all a corporation is supposed to do is to
represent the interests of the shareholders, which do not have to be
financially motivated.

In theory, corporations are not solely profit-seeking. In practice, they tend
to be.

~~~
JamesPeterson
I'm not sure if this is an Australia-only thing - and I was under the
impression that if was far from being so - but here the responsibility to
shareholders of a corporation is solely fiscal.

The reasoning behind this is that shareholder needs tend to differ. If
shareholders wish to engage in philanthropy, the corporation is not the ideal
(shared) vessel for doing so. Instead, individual investors may receive their
asset's rent and choose to distribute their earnings as they please;
management is employed to run the Corp and not make decisions for the
shareholders' philanthropic activities.

------
ig1
The problem is that Olson is clearly derived from a copyright source and it's
not clear that's it's protected by any of the fair use clauses.

The timezone data should have been derived from primary sources (legislation
in the particular countries, etc.), by deriving from a secondary source which
may have used editorial judgement in compiling that data there is potentially
a genuine copyright issue.

It should be possible to rewrite Olson without using a secondary source (if
it's not then it would imply that there is a clear copyright violation) and
that's what the community should attempt to do.

~~~
jerf
Facts can not be copyrighted. See Feist v. Rural:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural>

It is difficult to imagine what data this database contains that is somehow of
a creative nature, that comes from the source in question. Though I do recall
there being some actual text in the comments it didn't strike me as pulled
straight from an almanac.

~~~
kapitalx
There is arguably some creativity in the naming of the time zones, such as
"America/New_York" or "America/Los_Angeles". Though I have no idea if this is
part of the litigation or not.

~~~
tomp
This is basically the only readable naming convention that uses well-known
geographical names and is computer friendly (Unix-like separators, lack of
spaces). I see no creativity here.

~~~
kapitalx
There are many other naming conventions that could have been used such as
"Pacific Standard Time" or "PST" but the author chose to name the time zones
based on popular/well-known geographical locations as their timezone _names_ ,
not merely their descriptions. That is why its arguably creative.

In hindsight this seems like commonsense. But maybe not when it was designed.
I'm personally against these kind of litigations. But if its purely based on
interpreting the law, then this could be argued to be creative/expressive.

Again, I'm not even sure that the premise is even true. That is the litigation
might not even be about the naming convention.

~~~
ars
You should have researched more before posting. EST has not always meant the
same thing in all places, certain areas moved into different timezones are
different times, some places did or did not chose daylight saving time, etc.

By referencing the city name all those historical changes are also included.

You are only thinking about supporting the _current_ timezone, but this
database also supports timezones for past dates and times.

------
civilian
Just tell Astrolabe what you think of them on their facebook:
[http://www.facebook.com/pages/Astrolabe-Astrology-
Software-a...](http://www.facebook.com/pages/Astrolabe-Astrology-Software-and-
Services/52527078715)

~~~
Iv
I did, was removed.

~~~
brazzy
You and dozens of others, with no statements from their side at all.

------
doc_larry
We rely on heavily on timezone databases and when designing our app had a a
lot of debate on what would be the best way to go. We opted for a hybrid
solution implementing several options with redundency Never in our wildest
dreams did we imagine that the Unix TMZ database would be compromised in such
a a way. Just goes to show that you can never think of all contigencies, but
good planning and foresight is essential.

~~~
marshray
I wonder if even some GNU software has gotten caught up in this. Those guys
are pretty darn careful. Talk about justifying your paranoia!

~~~
pnathan
Each time something like this comes down the pipe, I click over one notch more
GNU/FSF.

------
muuh-gnu
Can somebody explain what benefits we have from having time zones _at all_?
They are an absolute mess:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/World_Tim...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/World_Time_Zones_2011_%28October_2011%29.png)
Wouldnt it be easier to have one time for the whole planet, like we have one
date for the whole planet? Is there some reasoning behind it or is it just
another case of historical baggage? There seems to be no other rationale
behind it than allies and trading partners wanting to have the same or
comparable time display.

~~~
ww520
There's UTC as the universal time for the whole planet. Just need to get
everyone start using it day to day.

~~~
bdunbar
The military does. It's called - or used to be called - zulu time.

It's only used by guys who -must- use it. Air plane drivers, strategic guys,
comm center operators.

Everyone else uses the local time.

I suspect if UTC / zulu were really the bee's knees some general would mandate
everyone use it.

Heck, they got me - a dumb American from the sticks - to think in metric
pretty easily. UTC would be a breeze.

------
sp332
If you need the latest version, Archive Team got a backup and put it on the
Internet Archive [http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-
au-2011...](http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-20111006)

------
varikin
Can someone explain how this will affect me? Will my code break because the
server is down or is this more of an issue for populating the time zone data
for OS and language libraries?

~~~
jholman
Your code won't break. And you probably won't even have any difficulty
populating the database on new installs, since your OS provider is probably
mirroring the current database.

But there are "between 20 and 100" changes to the worldwide timezone-set per
year. So three weeks from now, someone's gonna change their timezone rules,
effective perhaps 2013. Maybe it'll be Bolivia. And then three weeks later,
someone else, maybe some part of Indiana. Then three weeks later, maybe a
civil war in some ex-SSR or something finally resolves, and the two different
halves end up using different time zone plans (one of them uses DST, the other
doesn't, and neither of them use the USSR regime they had last year).

So now a year passes, it's 2012, what're you doing? Is your software using a
database that's a year (and maybe 50 events) out of date? Or did you hand-
maintain it, because you care about Indiana, and you got 10 of the 50 events?
Or maybe you used the Debian fork of tzdata?

And what am _I_ doing? Probably not the same thing as you. And now when my
software and your software try to interoperate (maybe our iCal calendaring,
maybe our enterprise order management integration bus service routing
frameworks, maybe we just want to agree when your mother's flight will land),
guess what. Sooner or later a relevant event happens in one of the altered
timezones, and someone misses a flight, and we get a very very difficult-to-
track-down bug.

Actually, it's not that terrible, as long as every time event you care about
takes place in a big important time-jurisdiction that'll be maintained by
every tzdata fork that every software you care about will use. Which I guess
could theoretically apply to me or you. I don't actually care about Indiana,
so I don't care if time events that take place there don't synchronize.

~~~
morpher
If we agree that most OS vendors will probably ignore the copyright claim and
keep using the current database, then one could put any newer updates into a
"patch database", which clearly would not be under any prior copyright (and
could be easily made available to everyone as the old database was). So, I
don't really buy your parable about how this will only affect future changes.
If tzdata "forks", it will be between what old (possibly copyrighted) data is
included.

~~~
jholman
Well, on the one hand, I agree with you about one source of forks being old
data, although at least this is a relatively simple fork: those who excise the
allegedly-infringing parts of the database, and those who do not.

On the other hand, I think you are completely groundless in your assertion
that it can't fork over future changes. There could be multiple patch
databases with disjoint changesets in them, with different software using
different databases.

And it's not _my_ parable. It's my rephrasing of the FA, and the comments by
the FA's author in his own comments thread.

------
jeza
You can vote for the second review here.... ;-)

[http://www.amazon.com/American-Atlas-
Expanded-5th/dp/0935127...](http://www.amazon.com/American-Atlas-
Expanded-5th/dp/0935127380)

edit: whoops direct link should be:
[http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BNKSLH3PYOCR/ref=cm_cr_dp_per...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BNKSLH3PYOCR/ref=cm_cr_dp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0935127380&nodeID=283155&tag=&linkCode=)

------
quellhorst
If this continues, we'll need a pirate bay for open source.

~~~
vetler
Good idea! It could be called "openbay"... Hmmm...

------
squeed
Interestingly enough, the database _is_ definitely copyrighted work in Europe.
See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right>.

~~~
nemoniac
The European database right lasts for only 15 years from each "substantial
modification" of the database. The work in question dates from 1991 and
contains mostly historical data so presumably those rights have expired.

------
guard-of-terra
I'm surprised that their (astrolabe) website is still up. Where's anonymous
with their LOICs when they are needed desperately?

------
apaprocki
Not sure if any IP lawyers are reading and could comment. Would it be helpful
to a case like this to crowd-source finding prior published art for the
specific ACS references in the files? This would be ideal for something like
Groklaw to pick up.

------
larrik
Serious question: Why do we need the old almanac entries anyway?

I can see current and future, but the almanac's data seems worthless to me.

~~~
apaprocki
Many computer programs need to deal with historical dates. Without these tz
rules captured into one place, it would be very difficult to determine when an
event happened in another timezone. Also, most data is either going to be
stored in UTC or in some domain-specific alternate "center" (New York time,
for instance), forcing conversions if a user wants to view the data in their
local time.

A contrived example: Say I'm in London and I want to know what time the NYSE
opened up in London-local time on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. That
requires looking up the opening time in NYC and then converting the time to a
different timezone, possibly taking into account DST in both locales.

------
antihero
Why are they shutting it down? Why don't they just update those entries to use
a different source?

------
dsl
Uh oh. Hopefully someone made a copy! :)

~~~
dsl
What? HN can't take a joke?

~~~
tef____
someone _did_ make a copy

[http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-
au-2011...](http://www.archive.org/details/archiveteam-munari-oz-au-20111006)

------
alinajaf
Slightly off-topic but here's a question about patents that I just can't wrap
my head around. Could you patent the contents of an RFC? If so, is it possible
for a company to patent the contents of all RFC's pertaining to TCP/IP and
then essentially own the internet?

~~~
derleth
It's completely off-topic (this is about copyright law) but here's an answer
anyway: Patents are ideally about _new_ inventions, which means that if
someone can find 'prior art' (evidence someone was doing it before you) they
can get your patent thrown out. (Ideally, extant prior art prevents the patent
from being issued in the first place.) An RFC, pretty much by definition, is
very good evidence of prior art, especially if it's a very well-known one, as
all of the ones relating to TCP/IP are.

In the real world, things get not so much more complex as a whole lot
stupider. Still, I think the courts could muddle through that one with minimal
problems.

