Having observed that the legal discussions here center so exclusively on
the time legislations of merely two countries (GB, US), I just felt the
sudden urge to make available a proper English translation of the German
Time Act of 1978 in its current revised form:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/zeitgesetz.en.html
As you can see, German law provides a fairly detailed independent
definition of what "Coordinated Universal Time" is (namely UTC-GMST at
1972-01-01 was +0.04 s, UTC ticks based on the SI second at sea level,
|UTC-GMST| < 1 s). It delegates the remaining technical details (how
does one implement the SI second, when exactly shall leap seconds
happen, how is time published, etc.) to the time experts at PTB. Neither
ITU nor IERS are mentioned there. German law considers it sufficient if
the relevant experts at the competent federal agency simply know about
such things and and discuss the remaining technicalities with their
international counterparts via the usual scientific communication
channels.
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
Received on Wed Jul 30 2003 - 14:19:36 PDT