The answer is, yes and no. Kafka and Heller would love this one. This is what I know as of a conversation yesterday:

Equibase gets its data from the tracks, which in turn have contracts with various photo finish companies-- Equibase has no contracts or leverage with the photo finish companies themselves. The guys we work with at EB do care, and have tried to get answers, but the people at each individual company refuse to answer, except to say that the information is proprietary, they use the same time for a "length" at all distances, and that the one they use is absolutely accurate (and I note here that they all may or may not be using the same conversion). Now that EB is aware of the situation they are going to try to at least standardize it, but that will take time.

A "length" is a unit of time, as I posted earlier. In response to questions, all companies apparently did agree they are using somewhere around .16 or .17 per length, but would not be more precise than that. We use .16, and it looks like there could be a margin of error of up to somewhere around 5%-- meaning about a half length either way at 10 lengths, or about 1/4 point for a horse beaten 10 lengths at a mile.

Those who know me can probably guess that there were some pretty wild (and funny) exchanges on this subject, like the one where someone said to me "look, when a running back gains three yards, is it always exactly 3 yards"? The part of my response which can be posted was, "but here they KNOW exactly how far it is. And the correct analogy is saying he gained 3 LENGTHS, and when someone says 'what's a length', you say 'can't tell you'".

Beyerguy and SJU5 have it exactly right. In some ways this industry really is a joke.