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Can you copyright someone elses name and the names of their friends?

• dhimes 17y ago
  No
• tedunangst 17y ago
  You can't copyright somebody's name and address, but you can copyright a map showing where everybody lives. That actually sounds like what Pete was doing, but Facebook could make similar claims about some of the information they provide. Everything from stock prices to the temperature is in theory uncopyrightable, but you can still run into trouble if you just scrape some site and republish it.
  • dedward 17y ago
    You can't copyright facts, but you can copyright collections of facts. This could have been an interesting case. And regarding robots.txt - it's by no means anything more than a suggestion and common courtesy.. it's a way to suggest to crawlers what to ignore and how to behave with your site, to their benefit and yours - it's not by itself a legally binding, well, anything..... it was just a convention for all parties to unofficially cooperate.
    • shard 17y ago
      You can't copyright facts, but you can copyright collections of facts. It depends, re: the oft cited example of phone books being uncopyrightable,
      • Lazlo_Nibble 17y ago
        There has to be some kind of creative component to the compilation. And arguably Facebook didn't even compile the data in the first place -- it'd be like a college claiming a compilation copyright on the band fliers, roommate requests, and lost-pet ads pinned to a bulletin board in the student union building.