Re: Caselaw and challenging claims of copyright

["Aaron Swartz" <xx@aaronsw.com>]

> IANAL, but I work with them constantly.  In general, you would want to
> talk to someone at, for example, EFF or a local public interest legal
> clinic.  My intuition is that there's not a lot of weight for their
> claiming copyright in numbers that result from a systematic process
> (lacking creativity).  Just go for it... best, Joe

Yeah, I think your best bet here is not that it's government data but
that it lacks the spark of creativity to be copyrightable. The
relevant Supreme Court case here is Feist v. Rural Telephone Service,
in which the court ruled that telephone books couldn't be copyrighted
because there was no creativity involved in listing people's names and
numbers. I think you can make the same argument about inspection
scores.

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