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Comment by Nitramp | Hacker News Reader

German copyright has the concept of a "Datenbankwerk" (since the 90s).

E.g. the telephone book contains lots of boring facts that are each in themselves not copyrightable. However the collection in itself is copyrightable, as it required substantial effort to create.

It seems odd that US copyright law wouldn't have a similar provision, or that it doesn't apply here?

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Also known as "sweat of the brow." The US Supreme Court rejected such protections in the 90s. I'm sure it's complicated, but copyrights are not presumed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_State...

It does, and the result is that phone books and maps get fictional entries inserted in order to prove copying -- because it is perfectly legal to do your own work to amass the same data set.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry

Like a Paper town or that time that Genius caught Google stealing their lyrics by playing with straight and curly quotes and writing a tool that watermarked songs by interchanging those quotes on the site. It was brilliant.

You might even say it was Genius.

If you scroll down to the "Legal Actions" section on Wikipedia, you'll find that these copyright traps have generally failed to serve their purpose when attempted in courts.

It's an actual carve-out. Database work is explicitly NOT protected - Feist v Rural was actually about a telephone book deemed unprotectable!

There is a concept in US copyright known as "thin" copyright. Collections of uncopyrightable information can in fact be copyrighted, but the arrangement of the information must have some spark or minimal creative energy. Mere "sweat of the brow" is insufficient to confer copyrightability on the work.

Such "thin" copyright tends to mean that there is a strong presumption against infringement. You generally need to demonstrate that the work has been copied virtually in its entirety to find infringement; partial borrowing is insufficient.

IANAL, but I think the US does have something similar. In the US, you can take works from the public domain, and then perform some sort of work, ex: restoration of a film, and then copyright that work. The difference being that someone else can use/release their own version of the same content, but they cannot use the work you did just because the content comes from the public domain.

US law has a very similar approach. See e.g. https://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html

But I don't think that's relevant here, as a) this isn't a copyright case and b) HiQ are not attempting to recreate the entire "compilation" of LinkedIn

I'm pretty sure the US has the same thing, basically. You can't copyright facts, but you can copyright presentation. So someone can't copy your map directly and sell it, because there's an artistic component to it. But they can make their own map with the same data, with a different style to it, and sell that.

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