Chaos feared after Unix time-zone database is nuked

[Daveski17]

I wasn't quite sure where to post this from The Register.

[dw426]

*Sigh* The copyright plague continues on. This should be fun to sort out

[Daveski17]

Yeah, I could never understand why the British Government never patented time when they invented GMT in Greenwich. They'd have made a fortune!

[Searching_ _ _]

The organization in charge of the Internet's address system is taking over a database widely used by computers and websites to keep track of time zones around the world.

The transition to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, comes a week after the database was abruptly removed from a U.S. government server because of a federal lawsuit claiming copyright infringement.

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.

Time zone database has new home after lawsuit - USA Today

The lawsuit:

The publisher of a database chronicling historical time-zone data is claiming copyright ownership of those facts, and is suing two researchers for re-purposing it in a free-to-use database relied on by millions of computers.

The data, which basically spells out past and future times anywhere in the world, is used in Java, Linux, PostgreSQL, Oracle and other programs to assign the correct time based on geographic location.

The researchers’ publicly available database was being hosted on a server at the Maryland-based National Institutes of Health, which apparently has removed the data at the request of Massachusetts-based publishing house, Astrolabe.

Astrolabe’s federal lawsuit, filed last week, is among the boldest claims of copyright infringement since 2005. That’s when Bikram Choudhury, the hot-yoga guru, claimed copyright to his yoga positions. Choudhury had sent cease-and-desist letters ordering studios to stop teaching what he claimed were his copyrighted yoga poses.

Publisher Claims Ownership of Time-Zone Data - Wired

[x942]

I really wish there was a patent pool that would fight for consumers and sue these idiots out of existence. Honestly if my company takes off and I have the money (power) I will do so and defend linux and FOSS. This people are greedy.