The problem is that Olson is clearly derived from a copyright source and it's not clear that's it's protected by any of the fair use clauses.
The timezone data should have been derived from primary sources (legislation in the particular countries, etc.), by deriving from a secondary source which may have used editorial judgement in compiling that data there is potentially a genuine copyright issue.
It should be possible to rewrite Olson without using a secondary source (if it's not then it would imply that there is a clear copyright violation) and that's what the community should attempt to do.
It is difficult to imagine what data this database contains that is somehow of a creative nature, that comes from the source in question. Though I do recall there being some actual text in the comments it didn't strike me as pulled straight from an almanac.
The data itself could be based on creative choices. For example: deciding the timezones for disputed territories, handling ambiguous historical date changes, the divisions of territories into timezones etc.
These are creative decisions, I worked at a largish tech company which developed it's own timezone database and it's a non-trivial process to decide how to divide geographic locations into timezones. A lot of locations you have to pre-emptively allocate a timezone, not because they have a different timezone from their surrounding area, but because they might at some point in the future have one.
The American Atlas (the work under debate) divides Indiana into 345 different areas and gives a timezone history for each one, but there are literally millions of ways you could have subdivided Indiana and ended up with different areas, it comes down to arbitrary decisions on how you group together different timezone changes. The 345 different areas were presumably chosen based upon a creative process.
"The American Atlas (the work under debate) divides Indiana into 345 different areas"
And the timezone file in question does not, unless I am very much mistaken. So even if we stipulate your point, which I don't, it wouldn't apply because the timezone isn't a copy of that aspect, and again, you can't copyright facts. Even if the timezone file used the same divisions, what would be protected is the Atlas' textual description of them, their textual history, whatever cute anecdotes are written up, not the fact of existence of 345 different areas in Indiana which have at some point had some sort of time zone difference.
You can take whatever facts in the world you like from whatever source, write them up in your own words, and the original author of the facts has zero copyright claim on your words. Copyright protects expressions, not facts. If you're managed to stretch your definition of copyright to the point that it says you can actually own facts, you have, by definition, in fact exceeded the domain of copyright. Nobody owns those 345 different areas of Indiana, only the words creatively used to describe them.
I think you miss the point, the division of areas for time-zoning purposes can be done in millions of different ways. The selection of a particular way to do it is a creative choice.
This inevitably means that the copyright in a factual compilation is thin. Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement. As one commentator explains it: "[N]o matter how much original authorship the work displays, the facts and ideas it exposes are free for the taking. . . . [T]he very same facts and ideas may be divorced from the context imposed by the author, and restated or reshuffled by second comers, even if the author was the first to discover the facts or to propose the ideas." Ginsburg 1868.
AFAIK, the tz data just maps timezones and date ranges to offsets. Your different areas don't matter at all here, because the tz data doesn't care about the mapping of geographical regions to time zones.
I'm not sure I follow, the tzdata AFAIK is primarily geographic mappings to time offsets and transitions ? - the number of timezones which are identified by timezone name like UTC are relatively few.
tzdata says absolutely nothing about geography. "America/New_York" is just a name for a certain set of historical timezone data, but it's completely up to users to decide what geographical area they want to associate with it.
"In regard to collections of facts, O'Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself. If Feist were to take the directory and rearrange them it would destroy the copyright owned in the data."
Please don't make me copy and paste the whole article, or worse, the whole ruling in here.
I concede the point. It looks like the litmus test used to be "sweat of the brow", overturned to be "creativity". The question then becomes, are time zones facts, or are they somehow creative expressions of categorization? If not, it's hard to imagine this standing up under the ruling you cite.
There is arguably some creativity in the naming of the time zones, such as "America/New_York" or "America/Los_Angeles". Though I have no idea if this is part of the litigation or not.
Creativity is the wrong word, the better word is "expression". To qualify for copyright protection, one must actually be expressing something beyond mere facts, not merely choosing from equally factual options. It is difficult to expand "America/New_York" into anything that is actually an expression coming from the almanac or the maintainer that isn't simply an objectively true fact. The closest I can come is "New York is an important, representative city in this time zone." and as expressions of something other than raw fact go, that's weak sauce. Anyone who claims that's not simply a fact would be doing so for the sole purpose of trying to argue a wedge issue in this specific context, not in good faith.
This is basically the only readable naming convention that uses well-known geographical names and is computer friendly (Unix-like separators, lack of spaces). I see no creativity here.
The important part of copyright is originality (not creativity). The test would be whether there was more than one way to express the information and whether there was originality in the expression chosen.
A court looking at the copyright status of the timezone database would look for originality in the selection of the identifiers. Why America/New_York and not America/NY or America/NYC or even America/East_Coast? Someone made a decision to choose one form over another so there is originality, hence it is copyrightable. The same applies for other systems such as Dewey Decimal classification or the Getty Thesaurus of Placenames.
That said, it seems the problem is not in the copyright status of the timezone database but in the fact the compilers used copyrighted work to derive their information. The assumption seems to be that makes it a derived work. I'm not so sure about that.
The existence of timezones are uncopyrightable facts. The boundaries of those timezones are uncopyrightable facts. The naming of the timezones is copyrightable by the database compilers not by the atlas owners unless the compilers copied the timezone names from the atlas. Anyone got a copy to check that?
There are many other naming conventions that could have been used such as "Pacific Standard Time" or "PST" but the author chose to name the time zones based on popular/well-known geographical locations as their timezone names, not merely their descriptions. That is why its arguably creative.
In hindsight this seems like commonsense. But maybe not when it was designed. I'm personally against these kind of litigations. But if its purely based on interpreting the law, then this could be argued to be creative/expressive.
Again, I'm not even sure that the premise is even true. That is the litigation might not even be about the naming convention.
You should have researched more before posting. EST has not always meant the same thing in all places, certain areas moved into different timezones are different times, some places did or did not chose daylight saving time, etc.
By referencing the city name all those historical changes are also included.
You are only thinking about supporting the _current_ timezone, but this database also supports timezones for past dates and times.
A naming convention, if it were eligible for IP protection, would be in the realm of patent or trade secrets. It would not be under copyright. Here copyright is claimed.
For the record in some countries primary legislation is sometimes copyrighted, and if it includes a map, the map might be copyrighted by the national mapping agency.
The law is copyrighted to the Government of Ireland. The law basically says "The shaded area on the map is the new city limits". However the map is almost certainly copyrighted to OSi (Ordnance Survey of Ireland), and is not free to copy.
The timezone data should have been derived from primary sources (legislation in the particular countries, etc.), by deriving from a secondary source which may have used editorial judgement in compiling that data there is potentially a genuine copyright issue.
It should be possible to rewrite Olson without using a secondary source (if it's not then it would imply that there is a clear copyright violation) and that's what the community should attempt to do.