Will Johnson wrote:
You cannot copyright a fact. That a certain chemical compound has a certain number (or whatever this is), is a fact which cannot be copyright. Same as a person's birthdate, or the last ten mayors of New York.
Certain publishers have, however, claimed with various degrees of success that it should be possible to claim a "compilation copyright" on a database full of facts.
See, for example, [[United States copyright law#Compilations and the sweat of the brow doctrine]] and [[Copyright law of the United Kingdom#Databases]]. A web search on "sui generis copyright" is also instructive; one hit is our own article on the EU [[Directive on the legal protection of databases]]. In particular:
Sui generis right
Copyright protection is not available for databases which aim to be "complete", that is where the entries are selected by objective criteria: these are covered by sui generis database rights. While copyright protects the creativity of an author, database database rights specifically protect the "qualitatively and/or quantitatively substantial investment in either the obtaining, verification or presentation of the contents"...
The holder of database rights may prohibit the extraction and/or re-utilization of the whole or of a substantial part of the contents...
In effect, this particular Sui generis right officially legitimizes the "[[Sweat of the brow]] doctrine" which (in the U.S., at least) had famously been minimized in [[Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service]].