I’d be in favour of excluding certain types of work from copyright protection entirely. Copyright isn’t there to create a barrier to interoperability or a way to artificially prevent competition in markets, so IMHO things like data formats and APIs should not be copyrightable. This isn’t to say that no real creative work is involved in producing those things, only that the damage to society from allowing them to be protected in this way is too great.

Curiously, the US does recognise this concept to an extent in its legal treatment of fonts, but unfortunately that remains the exception rather than the rule, and even that exception is not recognised in the global copyright treaties. There is still a long list of software and hardware that is protected from otherwise normal competition by repurposing copyright to prevent things like easily exporting a user’s own data to use with different software or swapping out a failed hardware product for an after-market alternative that wasn’t made by the original manufacturer. In this respect, copyright now acts like bad patents, subverting the original intent and corrupting any reasonable moral/economic arguments behind it, and instead merely providing a legal weapon for powerful incumbents to inhibit creative work it was supposed to encourage.