Comment by rprasad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rprasad | Hacker News Reader

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It's not the information that is copyrighted, it's the selection of what countries fall into what regions (and what to call the regions), which countries or cities to include, the order of the geographic regions, and even the order in which the geographic regions and their corresponding timezones are displayed. These are all choices that requires some amount of creativity (in the sense that they are not merely purely functional choices).

Feist stands for the proposition that any creative choice made in presenting information is sufficient for a valid copyright as to the creative choices made (thought the underlying factual information itself may not be copyrighted).

If this were to go to court, the copyright owner would win. How could the database be changed to get around the copyright at issue? Get rid of the region assignments, broaden (or narrow) the selection of cities/states/etc. included, or even simply flip the order in which geographic area and the corresponding timezone are listed.

I'm not sure I follow that reasoning.

In Feist even copying made-up entries designed to detect copying was deemed to not be an infringement.

The statement that "this area is assigned to this timezone" is not a creative decision. It's an assertion of a fact. Even if it's a false fact made up by the author, it's still an assertion of a fact.

That information is not subject to copyright.

Perhaps the particular expression of the information is.... but I'm not sure how the tz database infringes on that.

Am I missing something?

The statement that "this area is assigned to this timezone" is not a creative decision. It's an assertion of a fact. Even if it's a false fact made up by the author, it's still an assertion of a fact.

I think you are treading on thin ice with this reasoning. By the same token I might argue that "Harry said this to Ron and Ron said that to Harry" is an assertion of the fact that Harry and Ron had a conversation. What else is a novel except a collection of false facts made up by the author?

If you write a non fiction book that says "world war I was the cause of world war II" you are entitled to copyright protection for your expression. However, you don't earn a monopoly on the notion that WWI cause WWII even if you were the first to express that. Someone else can still write a book that conveys that fact.

The "creative work" isn't the fact that country a is in time zone b. That's just data. A description of the process and the reasoning used to reach that conclusion, and an analysis of available facts is an expression. A map visualizing the data is an expression. A formatted chart is an expression. The connection between regions and timezones is just data. It's not protectable.

> If this were to go to court, the copyright owner would win.

That depends on when they became aware of it, if they've been aware of it for a long time but didn't sue then that will considerably weaken their case. They won't lose their copyright but they may lose their ability to get any damages.

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