I've a list of all the winners of major sporting events in an encyclopedia. Obviously, the accompanying text is copyright, but how about the lists themselves? Can I just copy them verbatim? What if I scan them?

The _information_ is not copyrightable. Any _creative_ expression involved is, but that includes such things as the selection of which data to present, what order it is presented in, what other data is combined with, the physical layout, etc. See "Feist v. Rural" in Wikipedia.

As long as your list includes ALL the winners of certain events (so there's no "selection" issue), and lists them in some obvious way such as by year, and you list only the information and none of the accompanying text, and you arrange the data in an obvious way (don't copy a special table format or something), there is no problem. Scanning and then OCRing is fine--but presenting the scan as an image might run into choice of visuals like fonts and colors and such. 0