Copyright

[david at piano.plus.com]

This Wikipedia extract is quite helpful:

Compilations and the sweat of the brow doctrine

"Facts are considered synonymous to "ideas" or "discoveries" under this
law and are not copyrightable. By extension, a compilation of
uncopyrightable facts is also uncopyrightable. However, § 103 of the
Copyright Act allows for the protection of "compilations," provided there
is an "creative" or "original" act involved in such a compilation, such as
in the selection (deciding which things to include or exclude), and
arrangement (how they are shown and in what order).

The protection is limited only to the selection and arrangement, not to
the facts themselves, which may be freely copied.

The Supreme Court decision in Feist v. Rural further made clear the
requirements that a compilation be original in its composition, in denying
protection to telephone "white pages". The Feist court rejected what was
known as the "sweat of the brow" doctrine, in ruling that no matter how
much work was necessary to create a compilation, a non-selective
collection of facts ordered in a non-creative way is not subject to
copyright protection".

The essence of any case brought be Pierce would need to be a claim that
what someone had copied was not just the FACTS, but Pierce's ARRANGEMENT
of them.

Thus, Pierce would certainly have a strong case against anyone who
photocopied chunks of the book and gave it to someone else.  But if
someone copied out numbers and dates from the book by hand, in a different
order or arrangement, Pierce would find it very much more diffficult to
make a case.

I hope you don't mind me continuing this discussion folks. I find it
genuinely interesting and it will be useful as illustrative material for
the Law unit i am teaching next block (semester)!

I am most sympathetic to Pierce.  The existence of the internet, and
modern scanning and word-processing technology, is having wide-ranging
effects.

For an interesting musical copyright case, involving editing sheet music,
you might like to Google Hyperion copyright case.  The implications of the
decision here are potentially huge.