[tz] NIST leap-second file not yet updated

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Thu Feb 18 20:08:37 UTC 2016


Martin Burnicki <martin.burnicki at meinberg.de> writes:

> Agreed. I'm still wondering why it is so hard to say, "here is the file
> I've created, do with it what you want". ;-)

Years of legal effort by (mostly, but not exclusively) corporations to
make copyright restrictions the expected default, following the discovery
that a lot of valuable property entered the public domain because someone
didn't follow the precise (and varying-by-country) legal forms to ensure
that it didn't.

It's frustrating for our purposes, but some of the stories of the loss of
rights and, subsequently, money in the pre-Berne era from people like
mid-list fiction authors who failed to follow the right legal procedure or
who got tricked into signing very bad contracts are pretty compelling.
The law was written in consideration of those people, not for software or
for files like this, so it applies rather awkwardly.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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