Hello everyone.
Today we're going to be talking about data.
So data is commonly defined as a collection of facts or information, and
I personally tend to think of data as a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet.
But data can actually be a bunch of different things in teaching and research.
It could be archaeological notes from an archaeological dig, it could be
images from the Hubble Telescope, or even ocean tide measurements.
So under US copyright law, facts are not given copyright protection.
Therefore data as a compilation of data or
an arrangement of facts, are not protected.
The US also doesn't recognize what is sometimes called sweat of the brow.
So even if took you a lot of time and effort to collect the data,
that's not enough for it actually to get copyright protection.
So one of the reasons that we are so
certain about data is there was a Supreme Court case called Feist Publications,
Inc versus Rural Telephone Service from 1991.
And in that case, the Feist Publications had extracted whitepages
listings from the rural telephone director, and as you can imagine,
the rural telephone directory objected to this extraction of their information.
So, in that case, the US Supreme Court found that it was originality and
not effort that was the touchstone of copyright protection in directories and
other works that are basically fact-based.
So if you look at the whitepages, as the example in that case,
whitepages are arranged in a very logical order by last name.
So that is not enough in of itself to get copyright protection.
>> So hard work isn't enough in order to have a copyright.
>> No, it's really not.
>> But, just because data as facts doesn't get a copyright protection,
there are some additional things to think about around data.
One is that compilations are copyrightable.
And the definition of a compilation, according to US copyright law, is a work
formed by the collection of preexisting materials or of data that are selected,
coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work, as a whole,
constitutes an original work of authorship.
So the component pieces, not copyrightable, but
perhaps when compiled, you have something that can be copyrighted.