question about copyright and code, is this legal?

[Troy Rollo]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 18:44, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
> > On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 21:53, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
> > > The significant effort requirement is for EACH fact seen by ITSELF.
> >
> > This is certainly not the case in Australia, NZ and the UK.
>
> So you can have protection on collections of truely trivial facts?
> I severly doubt that. What legal purpose would that fulfill?

You can doubt it all you like - it doesn't make it any less true. The relevant 
cases effectively protect the act of collection, so although it may be 
possible to go out and repeat the collection, you can't get away with copying 
just because its possible to produce the identical result by doing the same 
work.

See: Desktop Marketing Systems Pty Ltd v Telstra Corporation Limited [2002] 
FCAFC 112 (15 May 2002)

<http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCAFC/2002/112.html>

That case states the law in Australia and also goes over the UK precedents in 
excruciating detail. The High Court refused to grant leave to appeal, so the 
DtMS rule will remain law unless and until Parliament decides to change it.

> Protecting trivially collectable collections of fact would serve
> no purpose that I can see...

Here, if the collection as a whole requires trivial effort to collect, it's 
not protected. It's the aggregate effort that counts. The problem with the MS 
tables is that from what has been said the aggregate has involved a lot of 
effort over many years.