Actually, you can copyright facts, or more specifically a work produced via a significant effort to compile facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_c

Actually, you can copyright facts, or more specifically a work produced via a significant effort to compile facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation This is precisely why mapmakers introduce deliberate errors, so they can prove that a plagiarizer produced a copycat atlas not by recompiling from the basic facts, but rather used the compilation as a starting point.