Civil Suit Filed, Involving the Time Zone Database 433
An anonymous reader writes "Arthur David Olson, the creator and maintainer of the timezone database used in about every unix/linux platform in use on the planet, just sent the message to the timezone mailing list: 'A civil suit was filed on September 30 in federal court in Boston; I'm a defendant; the case involves the time zone database. The ftp server at elsie.nci.nih.gov has been shut down. The mailing list will be shut down after this message. Electronic mail can be sent to me at @gmail.com. I hope there will be better news shortly.
--ado' A Google search does not yet reveal anything about this; does someone know what is going on?"
Astrology (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Complaint Text (Score:4, Interesting)
So, it appears that ACS is trying to claim copyright on the timezone historical data that they've compiled - and that's used in the TZ database.
Under Feist v Rural, information which has no "creative expression" is not copyright-able - but in this case, Olson can easily claim it doesn't apply.
This will be interesting.
Re:Astrolabe, Inc. v. Olson et al (Score:5, Interesting)
The law may be settled but that doesn't stop people from filing suit anyway. They may either think they have a notable enough exception or they're just working with a lawyer who knows he's going to lose but is getting paid to do what the client tells him to do (after doing his due diligence of informing them of the probable outcome).
Re:Complaint Text (Score:4, Interesting)
OK, so it's a copyright infringement case, claiming that ACS Atlas's compilation of historical time zone data was copied. It seems that this would fall under the "phone book" interpretation of copyright (facts cannot be copyrighted but their presentation can be) does anyone know if this ACS American Atlas software contained these historical time zones as tzdata source files that could have been copied?
Re:Astrolabe, Inc. v. Olson et al (Score:4, Interesting)
The facts were, to all appearances, copied out of a book and inserted into a database by the defendant. No selection was applied at any point; the time zones for every recognized country is included in both sources, so I don't think there's any argument that creativity is involved. I don't think database right applies here.
Re:Astrolabe, Inc. v. Olson et al (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like the Plaintiff's Lawyer don't care about a lot of things: "Sandwich Planning Board Member Julie C. Molloy Fined $3,000 for Improperly Representing Clients Before the Sandwich Zoning Board of Appeals"
http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=ethpressrelease&L=4&L0=Home&L1=Commission+Meetings+and+Publications&L2=Commission+Press+Releases&L3=2008+Ethics+Commission+Press+Releases&sid=Ieth&b=pressrelease&f=2008_molloy_0521&csid=Ieth [mass.gov]
Re:Astrolabe, Inc. v. Olson et al (Score:4, Interesting)
Which opponent does Astrolabe think they'll force into bankruptcy? This move is sure to draw in the orbital lawyer brigades from IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Red Hat and pretty much every other OS and device manufacturer in today's tech world. Maybe they thought they'd start small with Olson, but the presiding judge is going to soon be overwhelmed with amicae briefs.