Australian Judge Rules Facts Cannot Be Copyrighted

nfarrell writes "Last week, an Australian Judge ruled that copyright laws do not apply to collections of facts, regardless of the amount of effort that was spent collecting them. In this case, the case surrounded the reproduction of entries from the White and Yellow Pages, but the ruling referred to a previous case involving IceTV, which republishes TV guides. Does this mean that other databases of facts, such as financial data, are also legally able to be copied and redistributed?" Here are analyses from a former legal adviser to the directory publisher which prevailed as the defendant in this case, and from Smart Company.

Comments

Re:Settled law in the United States

[Trepidity]

To give a not-yet-litigated example of what I think would be the 3d analogy: A 3d model exactly capturing the surface of the Washington Monument is not copyrightable, because it's mere facts. However, particular photographs or films of the Washington Monument are copyrightable, as they have creative presentation. However (again), someone who collected a bunch of photographs or films of it and extracted a 3d model of the Washington Monument from them, would not be violating the copyright on the photographs or films, because they were merely copying the facts (the 3d spatial position of the stones).