Assuming all this will be judged under American law, as Amazon is an American company, the interesting cases here are Feist v Rural: > Feist Publications, Inc.

Assuming all this will be judged under American law, as Amazon is an American company, the interesting cases here are Feist v Rural: > Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991),[1] commonly called Feist v. Rural, is an important United States Supreme Court case establishing that information alone without a minimum of original creativity cannot be protected by copyright. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural (The specific holding was that you can't copyright the phone listings in a phone book because a simple alphabetical listing isn't creative enough.) and Bridgeman v. Corel: > Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), was a decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright in the United States because the copies lack originality. Even if accurate reproductions require a great deal of skill, experience and effort, the key element for copyrightability under U.S. law is that copyrighted material must show sufficient originality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_.... (Again, a court stated that in order to create a new copyright, the person had to exercise some creative spark; no machine alone can do that.) > I'm not sure how far you can bend the argument to say that computer reorganization of facts is expression. The Supreme Court seems to have said that it can't be a purely mechanical reordering. Of course, the whole point of having a judge is to create new judgements based on new fact patterns, so precedent isn't an absolute guide to future rulings.