[LEAPSECS] private smear goes public

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

--------
In message <CANCZdfrLh8gRJohhLOg_XG7i=qwxX5nNMhk0w3fs7ZfPO5Y3oA at mail.gmail.com>, Warner Losh writes:

>It's also all boilerplate. There's no creative content, so it's quite
>likely it wouldn't even qualify for copyright protection. You can't
>copyright facts, and that's all that differs from report to report.

That is actually an interesting detail.

The existence or non-existence of a leap second only becomes 'a
fact' as a result of the writing of the bulletin by the director
of the IERS.

Anybody can write a Bulletin-C with/without all the boiler-plate,
but that wont create or prevent the creation of a leap-second from
being created.

It is therefore not at all clear that Bulletin-C contains facts,
as much as it creates facts.   As such it is probably much closer
related to instruments of finance, which routinely create facts
(financial obligations) on creation.  The canonical example: Writing
a cheque.

Either way, I don't think that matters for copyright purposes,
because even if it is boilerplate you have created, you hold the
copyright on it.  Warhol is your poster-boy there.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.