This is very old hat. A friend battled the old British Telecom, after Deutsche Telekom (the rest crumbled after that) to publish Telex businesses directories a

This is very old hat. A friend battled the old British Telecom, after Deutsche Telekom (the rest crumbled after that) to publish Telex businesses directories a whole couple of generations ago. Copyright laws protect the structure and occasionally(via trade dress usually) formatting of your data. But common sense informs this entire oeuvre of issues that if the utility of the information that you are working with is inherently extant ion openness then the judiciary will politely post you a clue and the check. Utility forms a considerable amount of legal doctrine in so called intellectual property(which is a fallacious misnomer introduced into the lexicon purely for purely self serving reasons only very recently). Infringing a unused order poorly exploited patent and the registration owner sues? No fear because you're going to have to pay fair royalties and be allowed to carry on unless you been some kinda jerk. This is all about the appropriation of the basic infrastructure for human life. Yet the amount of misunderstood and very elementary (Googleable) law passing debate without comprehension is much more frightening than this moot threat, it indicates nearly complete cooption of principal values of human development.