I think you should read mo

This Court has long recognized that the fact/expression dichotomy
limits severely the scope of protection in fact-based works. More than
a century ago, the Court observed: "The very object of publishing a
book on science or the useful arts is to communicate to the world the
useful knowledge which it contains. But this object would be frustrated

if the knowledge could not be used without incurring the guilt of
piracy of the book." Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99, 103, 25 L.Ed. 841
(1880). We reiterated this point in Harper & Row:

"[N]o author may copyright facts or ideas. The copyright is limited to
those aspects of the work--termed 'expression'--that display the stamp
of the author's originality.

"[C]opyright does not prevent subsequent users from copying from a
prior author's work those constituent elements that are not
original--for example ... facts, or materials in the public domain--as
long as such use does not unfairly appropriate the author's original
contributions." 471 U.S., at 547-548, 105 S.Ct., at 2223-2224 (citation

omitted).

and....

It is this bedrock principle of copyright that mandates the law's
seemingly disparate treatment of facts and factual compilations. "No
one may claim originality as to facts." Id. 2.11[A], p. 2-157. This is
because facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship. The
distinction is one between creation and discovery: the first person to
find and report a particular fact has not created the fact; he or she
has merely discovered its existence. To borrow from Burrow-Giles, one
who discovers a fact is not its "maker" or "originator." 111 U.S., at
58. "The discoverer merely finds and records." Nimmer 2.03[E].
Census-takers, for example, do not "create" the population figures that
emerge from their efforts; in a sense, they copy these figures from the
world around them. Denicola, Copyright in Collections of Facts: A
Theory for the Protection of Nonfiction Literary Works, 81 Colum.L.Rev.
516, 525 (1981) (hereinafter Denicola). Census data therefore do not
trigger copyright, because these data are not "original" in the
constitutional sense. Nimmer [begin page 348] 2.03[E]. The same is true
of all facts - scientific, historical, biographical, and news of the
day. "[T]hey may not be copyrighted, and are part of the public domain
available to every person." Miller, supra, at 1369.


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