> Why would it be public domain?

Not sure if that's the case but they do not have element of creativity. They just copy real world so why would they deserve any monopoly?

The EU apparently has copyright-like protections for databases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right

EU has "sweat of the brow" doctrine, US does not.

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj9NJZUomjQ

Even copying the real world is copyrightable. If you take a picture of a street, you own the copyright to it.

Shouldn't you?

PS: Not including the weird exceptions in the EU of monuments and such.

There's some precedent in the US that "factual" photographs that have no creative element are not copyrightable. In practice, I think various contracts and EULAs will override copyright questions anyway.

> Shouldn't you?

Somehow I have thought that monopolies are so generally accepted as harmful, that it would be the proponents of monopolies that have the burden of proof. Not the ones who oppose monopolies.

So instead of just assuming that copyrights are good for society, can you provide some evidence?

Copyright of a picture of a street isn't a monopoly on that street, you can head over there and take a picture of the street yourself.

Other than that, just thing of photographers who spend their life working on photography. Copyright allows them to charge for their work, or for a software developer to charge for their work.

Removing copyright entirely means you can only monetize your work based on the marginal cost, the result is zero monetization for any type of work that has near-zero marginal cost, such as a book, movies, photography, etc.

Sure, you can argue that we should move to the fairyland dream scenario where everyone is beautifully funded by fans and so on. We've been there, it was how art in the Middle Ages worked.

Anyway, that is a separate discussion:

1) Given that copyright exists, should X be copyrightable?

2) Should copyright exist?

Bigger question as mentioned in the article. Who owns the copyright? If I bought a car, I should own all the data from it.

Sure, but you're also party to an adhesion contract where you're forced to surrender that ownership to the manufacturer. As Coase pointed out, the initial allocation doesn't matter so much as the market will get it to whomever can best exploit it. The liability is in carving out a market-legible ownership handle to begin with.

But copyright is likely moot anyway, as the cars will be imprisoned [0] with strong digital restrictions to siphon the data to manufacturers while preventing access by people.

[0] The complement of "jailbreak", right?

EU laws in general are quite hostile to adhesion contracts - pretty much all terms that where a consumer is forced to surrender something meaningful to use a product they bought are considered null and void in EU. If customer is shown a common EULA stating "you surrender copyright of these things to the manufacturer" and needs to click "I agree" before proceeding, then in EU that does not imply any legally binding commitment whatsoever and does not imply that the consumer surrendered those rights; if they were forced to do so in a standartized mandatory agreement, then that doesn't count.

You won't be buying any cars in future...

Doesn't Feist preclude copyrighting raw data that wasn't created through some creative spark? That's in the US, granted, but I'd hope similar principles would apply in other jurisdictions.

Telemetry from a car is a side effect from using it rather than an intended product.

Quite the opposite. Telemetry data is an intended product, because it allows for improvements to the underlying product and much more (such as mapping, for example).

Think of it as Google Analytics. If you run a site and use Google Analytics on it, do you own the copyright of the data generated by it?

Facts aren't supposed to be copyrightable. They aren't creative works.

In the US. Compilations of facts do however often merit protection in the EU, both under the Database Directive and national copyright laws.

Telemetry isn't facts. Taking a picture of something isn't a fact.

What and odd thing to say:

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fact

Telemetry is simply gathering of factual information. And it's not produced by a human. There is no copyright for something produced by machines or animals, so far.

You can consider copyrightability of something produced by intelligent machine (human like), but that's a whole topic in itself and not even the case here.

You can own copyright on a dataset of facts.

A map is a dataset of facts. The MLB stats are a dataset of facts.

Copyright doesn't mean that you can't create a work that is similar based on the same facts, it just means that to do so you can't copy the original work.

You can create a new map of the streets, but you can't just do so by copying an existing map (with the exception of certain licenses and so on).

The “animals can’t hold copyright in the US” principle was reaffirmed recently in the monkey selfie case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

> Why would it be public domain?

Copyright is supposed to protect creative works. There is such a thing as a threshold of originality. There are database rights, but that is separate from copyright.