It's more like if I look at thousands of articles and produced a big spreadsheet containing interesting facts about those articles, like word frequencies or wha

It's more like if I look at thousands of articles and produced a big spreadsheet containing interesting facts about those articles, like word frequencies or what words tend to come after what other words. I never before heard anyone suggest that that kind of analysis would be copyright infringing. The new thing is that someone figured out how to organize dumb facts like that in a clever way and use it to create something sometimes useful, but without actually copying parts of the original articles since those were never saved as part of the data.