The Copyright Act specifically applies to "original works of authorship", and in 1991 the Supreme Court decided that phonebooks specifically are not original wo

The Copyright Act specifically applies to "original works of authorship", and in 1991 the Supreme Court decided that phonebooks specifically are not original works of authorship, although individual design elements in the book itself may be. http://www.ivanhoffman.com/database.html http://www.ivanhoffman.com/database.html is a good overview. However, there is what's called a "compilation copyright", which is covered rather nicely at http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html - the theory there is that the selection of data is original authorship. This is still based on the same Supreme Court case (Feist), where the Court stated that if the underlying data (phone numbers and names) is uncopyrightable (you can't copyright facts), then if that data is "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship" the database may be copyrighted. But the basic point of Feist is that phonebooks in particular are not subject to copyright. That's why I led off with that example, and it took me one Google search (on "database copyright", and these links were #3 and #4) to confirm my vague memory. I'd actually say at this point that the database in the original post is probably not copyrightable. Which is all fine and good, because it won't stop a company from suing you, and may the richest man win. So it changes nothing from the practical standpoint - copyrightable or not, the original poster would be better off finding independent sources of data.