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.
