Now I am not a copyright lawyer but this is how I understand it: this entire database is a copyrighted work owned by ISO. If you pay them CHF 300 you can download the database and then use use it freely. But when you gather that entire dataset (transformed or not) back to a full database format, it is still a derived work - the copyright of which is owned by ISO.
This is of course completely hair splitting as you will not see ISO coming after anyone spreading the database in any format (it would be a PR disaster). But if you asked the opinion of a corporate lawyer, they might say you technically need to pay ISO before you can use a copy of the entire database in your app. And I bet that's why they have the form to pay the CHF 300 if someone somewhere has a compliance department telling them to be 100% sure they are not breaching any copyrights..
Maybe someone who actually knows anything about copyright law can comment..
EDIT: The situation is indeed unclear as I predicted, probably on purpose. See here https://datahub.io/core/country-list#license :
> It should be noted that this material is ultimately sourced from ISO and their rights and licensing policy is somewhat unclear. As this is a short, simple database of facts there is a strong argument that no rights can subsist in this collection. However, ISO state on their site:
>> ISO makes the list of alpha-2 country codes available for internal use and non-commercial purposes free of charge.
> This carries the implication (though not spelled out) that other uses are not permitted and that, therefore, there may be rights preventing further general use and reuse.
Likewise, if ISO says they allow "free-of-charge use" of the database, it implies their permission and allowance is required to use it in the first place. This implies that if you embed the database to your app, it contains proprietary material by ISO. This limits your rights for example re-licensing it, as you can not re-license without consent from ISO, the copyright holder.
Again - this is only a theoretical problem, yet the ambiguity is rather annoying to a pedant.