Time Zone Database Has New Home After Lawsuit 238
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.'"
Re:So? (Score:1, Insightful)
The 'so' part would be that the previous stewards of the database did not feel they had the necessary funding to find out whether it violated patents. It would cost something to just 'find out', and if the verdict was that it did it could cost yet more.
ICANN appears willing and able to spend the money to find out, which might be enough to send the astrology folks packing.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, patents? This issue involves copyrights .
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lawsuit is totally baseless (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter if it's baseless and would get tossed out of court -- eventually. The former database maintainer didn't have the budget to fight back.
If you want to blame someone, blame the "justice" system that allows frivolous lawsuits to be filed in the first place.
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Use a local clock? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Lawsuit is totally baseless (Score:3, Insightful)
A system that forbids even the filing of frivolous lawsuits would be unfair. It would raise the burden too high on legitimate lawsuits. "Disallow" means you give the court clerks the authority to glance over documents and just shred them if they decide they're frivolous. Leave that decision up to the judges instead.
Re:Slightly off-topic but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hopefully never more in a world in which I live.
You know what's instructive? To contemplate the roll of human beings who Christians have burned at the stake, drowned, beheaded, tortured, and otherwise grievously harmed, then repeat the exercise for other religions, then finally point me to a case where astrologers have done that to anyone.