[LEAPSECS] LEAPSECS Digest, Vol 45, Issue 1

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <20100902183636.GB13786 at ucolick.org>
            Steve Allen <sla at ucolick.org> writes:

: On Thu 2010-09-02T19:26:03 +0100, Ian Batten hath writ:

: > It would be interesting to produce a list of countries where legal

: > time is not UTC, to see what the divide would look like.  Wikipedia

: > claims Belgium, Canada and Eire: for extra fun, I bet most consumers

: > of time signals in Belgium use DCF77 or TDF, which are clearly in UTC

: > land, rather than MSF.

: 

: IANL, but based on a few documents I've seen

: 

: Canadian standard time is provincial, not federal.

: Quebec adopted UTC on 2007-01-01, and the others have not.

: 

: Venezuela standard time is based on the Greenwich meridian,

: whatever that means ...

: 

: If that issue were pressed to the courts it would be very interesting

: to see the results of the cases in each country especially in the

: light of the shifts of the longitude origin during the last 60 years,

: the first 3 of which are here

: http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/BIHAR1968.JPG


I'd wager that UTC, whatever its realization, would likely trump any
locally written laws.  After all, UTC has been a widely accepted
approximation of the local laws that's attained the force of law
through repetitive use (how many real-time realizations of UT1 are
propagated, in comparison to UTC).  So underlying technical changes to
UTC may not change that.  It would take a long, and complicated, legal
argument to show that UT1 is what should be used (even though nobody
knows what it is, day to day).  Given the current miss-mash of legal
rulings around software, I'd guess that this wouldn't be a "clear cut"
ruling that people in this group have suggested.

Warner