I hesitate to take this thread further astray, but I think it's worth it. Sorry. Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote on Fri, 7 Apr 2017 at 12:22:34 -0700 in <7fe9a9c9-248a-288d-8923-a61167b5eaf4@cs.ucla.edu>:
I didn't refer to any copyright notice, as there is no such notice for the IERS file <https://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/ntp/leap-seconds.list>. So by U.S. law (which now follows the 1988 Berne Convention) the file is copyrighted and cannot be reproduced without permission.
That is not precisely correct, in at least 2 ways: (1) A work may be in the public domain without an explicit declaration if the author has made it sufficiently clear in other places. For instance, works of the United States government are in the public domain and cannot be copywritten (see p.3 of Circular 3 that you cited). I'm not saying this is the case with the French government or the IERS, but lack of notice is not sufficient to decide one way or the other. (2) Just because a file is copyrighted does not mean it cannot be reproduced without permission. In the US we have "fair use," which is a complicated set of tests and which is not exactly the same in all countries. But nonetheless, it can be allowed (through fair use, and maybe other doctrines) to reproduce all or part of a copyrighted work absent explicit permission in the appropriate circumstances. Additionally, *facts* cannot be copyrighted. Again, I don't mean to opine on whether the IERS file constitutes facts as opposed to being a creative work, but there's at least some reason to think that it does. It's probably worth some effort to try to clarify how this all plays out with respect to the IERS file. Didn't someone volunteer to talk to them last year? --jhawk@mit.edu John Hawkinson