[time-nuts] law and regulation applying to time.. was Re: OOPS on my wwv legal post

[jimlux]

On 8/29/18 6:55 PM, John Hawkinson wrote:
> Continuing reference to what is "legal" or "the law" is very confusing to me because no one has cited any statues, regulations, or case law.
> 
> What's the basis for these claims about legal requirement? Can we please cite chapter and verse? Without it, it's hard to distinguish rumor and anecdote from fact, or refute anything.
> 
>

This is an interesting point - a year or so ago (probably around the 
time of the last leap second) there was all this stuff about UTC and 
leap seconds vis a vis electronic trading

There's a internationally agreed second (defined by vibrations of Cs, 
etc.), and I assume that "standard practice" is that everyone adopts 
this rate.

But is it a legal or regulatory *requirement* - or is it just standard 
practice, in the same sense that everyone uses the same M2 or 6-32 
threads.  There's no *law* that requires me to use a particular pipe 
thread or resistor color code. There's a standard that has been 
promulgated for these things, and if I buy, and you sell, it's to our 
mutual advantage to use the same standard.

But if wanted to be "different", (say I was hand crafting English sports 
cars :), I could use a completely different series of fasteners and 
standard dimensions, and I could even use the positive terminal of the 
battery as the chassis common.

But is there some International banking agreement that requires UTC? Or 
a SEC rule?

I buy lots of things that have requirements that say, in effect 
"calibration shall be traceable to NIST or other National Standards 
Lab", but that's a *contractual* requirement, not a *legal* requirement.

There may well be a law in the United States, probably buried in some 
enabling or appropriating bill, that says "The Department of Commerce 
shall provide national standards for mass, time, voltage, etc."  but 
that doesn't say "and all residents of the United States shall use only 
the standard provided by the Department of Commerce, and no other"

What about Germany? Notoriously it is "Das Land der Gebote, der 
Vorschriften, und der Verbote."  (Commandments, regulations, and 
prohibitions)