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Oz High Court Hears Landmark TV Guide Copyright Case
highways writes "It's rare that that a copyright case is heard in the Australian High Court, let alone a case heard by all seven sitting judges. At stake is a small company IceTV (which we discussed when it launched four years back) taking on Australia's largest television station, the Nine Network, over the copyright status of the weekly broadcast schedule. That is, the schedule itself, not any synopsis or description of the individual programs. Users of PVRs such as MythTV will be well aware of the hassle it is to get a reliable program schedule stream to use for recordings. The saga has gone on for more than two years with Nine unsuccessfully suing IceTV, but later winning on appeal. At issue is whether a list of facts like an electronic program guide is a 'compilation' protected under Australian copyright law. This has implications for the copyright status of many publicly available databases and the limits to which the information can be distributed."
There is nothing in United States copyright law which provides copyright protection on the basis of the skill and labour required to produce it.