When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite - Winston Churchill
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ICANN steps in to host the timezone database
INTERNET ADDRESS OUTFIT, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has taken over hosting the international timezone database.
Last week it was revealed that the timezone database that has for years been maintained by volunteers had been taken offline following a legal dispute with Astrolabe Inc. Now ICANN has stepped up to host the database while knowing full well of the ongoing lawsuit.
Astrolabe argued that the two volunteers should pay royalties for including data from its software. ICANN has said it will keep the historical data in the database it is hosting.
Kim Davis, a technical manager at ICANN told USA Today, "We are aware of the lawsuit ... we believe it's important to continue the operation of the database. We'll deal with any legal matters as they arise."
The timezone database, which maps regions to offsets of coordinated universal time (UCT), is updated many times every year and is used by just about every operating system apart from Microsoft's Windows. While the timezone offsets were available even after the database had been taken offline, without continuing updates it would eventually end up providing incorrect offset information for certain regions.
While ICANN's decision doesn't make Astrolabe's legal challenge disappear, it does offer significantly more stability for this vital internet infrastructure service.
It likely also won't be entirely lost on Astrolabe that ICANN has sufficient resources to go to court in order to preserve general availability of timezone data, so it seems possible that an out of court settlement eventually might be reached to resolve the issue. µ
Tags: Software
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There have always been frequent changes to timezones, it’s not just a recent thing. The only reason you didn’t notice was that you used a proprietary OS (e.g. Microsoft Windows) where the vendor couldn’t be bothered providing frequent updates, people in the affected areas could just go to hell.
Consider the change that Chile made to its daylight-saving rules at very short notice earlier this year: a patch was available for the timezone database that same week.
From the complaint (http://www.scribd.com/doc/67760407/ASTROLABE-INC-Vs-ARTHUR-DAVID-OLSON-and-PAUL-EGGERT-Complaint):
8. In connection with its rights to reproduce the Works, plaintiff Astrolabe is
contractually obligated to pay royalties to the owner/assignor of the copyright
and the authors of the same.
IOW, "We don't own the copyright, but grant us this injunction anyway."
Trolls
What's the deal of all that changing anyway? It's clearly a relatively new thing, it used to be you needed an update every year or even few years, now sometimes it's monthly, who the hell is getting those people to constantly change their timezone in the first place? And why?
And how does that not destabilize the entire region/country and costs lots of money to adopt, and why doesn't that stop them? Is there some sort of wallstreet profit in changing timezones? Some speculative advantage for the banks?
Icann has the power to shut down the internet at the will of the USA Governent as passed by Congress.
EVERYBODY WANTS DST HANDED TO THEM ON A SILVER PLATTER, FRICKIN FREELOADERS. ALL YOU CRIMINALS MAKE ME SICK. I WOULD PUT THE ENTIRE WORLD BEHIND BARS.
Well done, ICANN. Anybody trying to claim ownership (copyright) of simple facts should be stomped on hard and often.
The fact that someone has gone to the trouble to compile a list of facts does not give them any right to stop others from using or publishing those facts. This is well established in the USA by the Supreme Court's 1991 telephone book decision.
Hmm...since a lot of US Government systems are thus also dependent on this database, I wonder if a little "pressure" might not be put on AstroTurf--er, AstroLabe to settle for, say, $1. The Feds don't like being messed with. :-)
Fat chance on a settlement. It's obvious these Astrowhatever guys are playing the lawsuit lottery game.
Someone needs to sit down and trace back where the various database components were obtained from, and what public sources for them exist. With that it should be easier to convince even a judge in Massachusetts that this is an outrageously imaginative stretch of copyright law.