Re: ITU-R TF.460 past, present, and future

[Ed Davies]

Steve Allen wrote:

 ...
 Basically, as a result of this case it has been established that the
 law in the United States must be in the public domain, and this holds
 true even if the law incorporates an external document merely by
 reference.  So, if NIST tries again to modify the US Code in this
 fashion, and they succeed, then the ITU will lose their copyright over
 the content of TF.460 within the United States.  Any citizen of the US
 will not be liable for reproducing it.
 ...

Well, to be precise: any citizen of the US will not be liable for
reproducing it *in the US*.

However, I think that by international treaty the US has agreed to
protect the copyright of works made in most other countries.
Therefore, US law cannot adopt UTC by reference to TF.460.

Ed.

German Time Act of 1978, now available in English

[Markus Kuhn]

Having observed that the legal discussions here center so exclusively on
the time legislations of merely two countries (GB, US), I just felt the
sudden urge to make available a proper English translation of the German
Time Act of 1978 in its current revised form:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/zeitgesetz.en.html

As you can see, German law provides a fairly detailed independent
definition of what Coordinated Universal Time is (namely UTC-GMST at
1972-01-01 was +0.04 s, UTC ticks based on the SI second at sea level,
|UTC-GMST|  1 s). It delegates the remaining technical details (how
does one implement the SI second, when exactly shall leap seconds
happen, how is time published, etc.) to the time experts at PTB. Neither
ITU nor IERS are mentioned there. German law considers it sufficient if
the relevant experts at the competent federal agency simply know about
such things and and discuss the remaining technicalities with their
international counterparts via the usual scientific communication
channels.

Markus

--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__