Legal Question in Intellectual Property in Minnesota
A book contains a data table of information that has been compiled from other sources. The data itself is public information such as place names and distances. Can I create a webpage to display this information without permission?
For example, say you publish a table of all the lakes in a given geographic area. You include the lake's name, area, the nearest town, and what kind of fish it contains. These data are available from many sources, including federal and local government data bases and maps. Can I copy your data table into a data base to allow users to view the data on-line, sorted to suit their needs, rather than gather the the information original sources myself?
I understand that if there were columns in the data that were "creative", such as the author's personal rating on the quality of fishing, they would be protected by copyright and I would exclude that information.
1 Answer from Attorneys
List s including the order they are compiled and the form can be protected by copyright laws. In other words, you must compile your own list and cannot simply copy the list of another.
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