On 2 Apr 2007 at 12:03:04 +0100, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
How *on earth* do you get this as being a violation of copyright? The BBC don't own facts about the show.
The same way that the UK Top Ten is the property of the company that publishes it, and a list of No. 1 hits in the UK is asserted by them to violate that copyright.
Under U.S. precedent (the Feist decision) (of course, law in the U.K. and elsewhere may vary or be unsettled) if the selection and arrangement of a list is entirely by objective criteria which could be performed mechanically, then the list is factual information that is not copyrightable (the case in question involved a telephone directory, including all listed numbers in a given town arranged alphabetically). If there's some subjectivity involved (like a list of the best songs of all time according to some critic or group of critics) then it's probably copyrightable.