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Purely factual books are copyrightable. It is the collection and curation of those facts that is protected. You cannot just copy someone else's 100 Amazing Fact

by feoren 2y ago

Purely factual books are copyrightable. It is the collection and curation of those facts that is protected. You cannot just copy someone else's 100 Amazing Facts about The Rainforest verbatim; if you publish 100 Cool Truths about The Jungle and it has those same 100 facts, you'll get sued and they'll easily win.

jcranmer 2y ago
The EU and the UK generally has something akin to "sweat of the brow", where collections of facts that took time to collate are copyrightable. But in the US, Feist v Rural explicitly disavowed the sweat of the brow doctrine, and said that facts have no copyright value--a work requires a quantum of original creative spark to be copyrightable (it was discussed in the context of phone books--a phone book does still have some residual "thin copyright", but the listing of phone numbers is not copyrightable, and it is actually difficult to infringe on the thin copyright of a phone book). In the US, your example would easily be found to be not infringing, if the only similarity were reproducing the same 100 facts.
- schoen 2y ago
  However, if it states the facts in exactly the same way, that could be considered infringing because of the creativity presumably involved in deciding how to state each fact. "Elephants are enormous mammals, usually grey in color, with significant intelligence and social habits. They are native to portions of Africa and Asia, with different elephant species found in each region. They are famous for their strong and dexterous trunks, which can also be used to communicate something like a trumpet. Humans, especially in South Asia, have long admired elephants and used them for transportation and various kinds of work; African elephants are famous for having been ridden to war by the Carthaginians, to the dismay of their Roman opponents. Today elephants are significantly threatened by various human activities, both those intentionally directed at the elephants (like killing them for meat or for the ivory derived from their tusks) and those not deliberately meant to affect them (like deforestation). While our word for elephants comes from the Greek, it was probably borrowed by the ancient Greeks from another language family." I just wrote this paragraph about elephants based on my own knowledge. There is no copyrightability of the substantive information here (e.g. if you learned something new about elephants, you can tell other people) but there is probably some copyrightability of the paragraph based on things like the creativity of my word choices. That distinction can sometimes create confusion in discussions about "facts", and I'm not positive that legal standards that are meant to clarify it have always given a clear and workable rule.
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    that is not a list of facts however. This is a list of facts Largest Land Animals By Size: African Bush Elephant Asian Elephant African Forest Elephant ...

by feoren 2y ago

jcranmer 2y ago

The EU and the UK generally has something akin to "sweat of the brow", where collections of facts that took time to collate are copyrightable. But in the US, Feist v Rural explicitly disavowed the sweat of the brow doctrine, and said that facts have no copyright value--a work requires a quantum of original creative spark to be copyrightable (it was discussed in the context of phone books--a phone book does still have some residual "thin copyright", but the listing of phone numbers is not copyrightable, and it is actually difficult to infringe on the thin copyright of a phone book). In the US, your example would easily be found to be not infringing, if the only similarity were reproducing the same 100 facts.

schoen 2y ago
However, if it states the facts in exactly the same way, that could be considered infringing because of the creativity presumably involved in deciding how to state each fact. "Elephants are enormous mammals, usually grey in color, with significant intelligence and social habits. They are native to portions of Africa and Asia, with different elephant species found in each region. They are famous for their strong and dexterous trunks, which can also be used to communicate something like a trumpet. Humans, especially in South Asia, have long admired elephants and used them for transportation and various kinds of work; African elephants are famous for having been ridden to war by the Carthaginians, to the dismay of their Roman opponents. Today elephants are significantly threatened by various human activities, both those intentionally directed at the elephants (like killing them for meat or for the ivory derived from their tusks) and those not deliberately meant to affect them (like deforestation). While our word for elephants comes from the Greek, it was probably borrowed by the ancient Greeks from another language family." I just wrote this paragraph about elephants based on my own knowledge. There is no copyrightability of the substantive information here (e.g. if you learned something new about elephants, you can tell other people) but there is probably some copyrightability of the paragraph based on things like the creativity of my word choices. That distinction can sometimes create confusion in discussions about "facts", and I'm not positive that legal standards that are meant to clarify it have always given a clear and workable rule.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  that is not a list of facts however. This is a list of facts Largest Land Animals By Size: African Bush Elephant Asian Elephant African Forest Elephant ...