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Can you copyright tz data at all? This has nothing to do with "creative" work, but is simply a (pre-existing) mapping between countries, dates, and offsets.

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No, you can't -- the Supreme Court in 1991 ruled that even wholesale copying of a telephone book was legal, because you can't copyright facts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

Aren't timezone delineations and values set through legal means anyway? Does it even make sense that the specifics in a law can be copyrighted?

Their complaint points out that not all historical timezones used in practice are actually defined by law.

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