No, in the US you cannot copyright facts, only expression. So you have control over word-for-word copies of your article about a bird; but you have no control over dissemination of the facts you discovered about the bird. SCOTUS decided this in 1991, Feist v. Rural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

You might be thinking of sui generis database rights, which DOES cover collections of facts. The EU, Russia, and Brazil recognize this right, but the US doesn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States

The US does recognise compilations as copyrightable though (but there must be decisions made about what to include).

See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/6/6f/Protection_of_C...

It could be a system, oracle, or network, which computes weights or votes, just as soon as it could be an individual or group casting ballots or deliberating. The deciding is key, perhaps not who decides. Some aspects of law are slippery like that though, where one set of rules applies to human agents, and a different, perhaps mutually exclusive set, apply to everything else.

For example, horse drawn carriages have the right of way even over pedestrians, because you’re pulling weight, or more accurately, a beast of burden is pulling the weight. It’s a living thing too, and it can’t stop on a dime when it’s got a load. It makes sense when you know the context and framing for why the law is so written today.

I’m sure there are similar examples in others contexts. Court cases and judges look at the law like we do whitepapers. Some docs are better than others, and there are some devs, and other judges’ toes you’d be hesitant to tread on, especially if you have a habit of doing that kind of thing.

Right. "Expression" isn't restricted to specific wording, it can potentially mean specific choices of what is included and what is included in a compilation; I could hold a copyright to such a compilation even if I don't hold the copyright to any of the items in the copyright.

For example, many artists publish playlists on Spotify to build their brand; it could plausibly be copyright infringement for one of them to verbatim copy a playlist I made and publish it as their own, even if I don't hold the copyright to any of the songs on my playlist, and even if one of the songs on the playlist was actually that artists' own song. The act of assembling a playlist is potentially copyrightable expression.

Compilations of facts are copyrightable in the US, but they can't be just raw collections - there has to be a choice made what to include.

> The Act also provides copyright protection to compilations, but only to the extent that there has been a contribution of originality in assembling that compilation.

Map copyright is based on the idea there are decisions made around what to include and how to display it.

You can't photocopy a map and claim copyright. However, a human can trace the same map and claim copyright.

See City of New York v. GeoData Plus, and the discussion in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/6/6f/Protection_of_C...

Regarding compilations of facts, the general doctrine is that copyright would protect the semi-arbitary choices of what to include in that compilation (e.g. judgement of relevance - which words to put in dictionary, what detail to include/exclude in a map) and disallows copying that compilation; but it explicitly does not protect "work and sweat" required to gather that data, and allows people to copy particular facts out of that compilation, for example, if they are making their own selection with different criteria, as the underlying facts are not protected no matter how much effort it took to obtain them.

In this regard, copying lyrics of some particular song does not violate the rights of Genius - they don't have copyright to that particular song and the compilation-of-facts rights don't apply for that particular single item.

I would guess maps is a different case because those are their own works. There are decisions on design being made, how to show overlays. But that’s just my assumption.

Why does it matter whether you're transcribing lyrics or transcribing geography? In both cases you're effectively just writing down something that exists already.

Exactly. This should definitely be grounds for allowing copying google maps data as long as you render it in your own style. The usual trick here is trap data where map makers insert fake data to catch copies but thats exactly what happened here with the ' in the lyrics.

If the actual data isn't copyrightable, yet the 'fake/trap data' is, then presumably when one copies the map, a court will decide that the magnitude of the copying is very small - only a single apostrophe was copied - and therefore the damages negligible.

If fake data is hidden amongst real data, wouldn't there also be the argument that the copier was unaware that they were copying a creative work rather than pure facts?

Fred Saberhagen made this a plot point in one of his Berserker stories. Going by my highly suspect memory...

A damaged Berserker captures an atlas showing an occupied system nearby, and heads there with its last reserves of power to destroy the system.

The human who didn't stop the Berserker is charged with a crime against sentience, but is acquitted when he reveals the secret: The occupied system was a fake, in the tradition of cartographers going back to the Middle Ages on Sol.

Just add some small, inconsequential error to all positional data.

Does this mean Genius can add a few non-breaking spaces to the lyrics, with a couple of odd unicode characters that look like periods and commas.

I guess at some point it’d end up looking like a ReCaptcha and there’s enough of those already ...

Thats exactly what they did with commas. Didn't help them.

Because you are allowed to (I presume) copy the raw data (gps coordinates of roads, buildings, etc.) But you don’t have access to it, instead you only see their map design.

The equivalent would be to copy an existing map, not to create a map based on your observations of the world.

But what google did here was not listening to every song and writing down the lyrics. They just copied the text off another website.

The land is there. Depicting it is the result of Google's work. You went over, or used a satellite photo with the appropriate licensing and YOU painted (created) the map.

Lyrics are not just found in the wild (like a mountain or a street is). Someone thought of them, wrote them down, so it was their creation. It is like listening to me reciting a poem, write it down, and sell the book.

This is a classic example of the map not being the teritory that I think gets the point across: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"

I don't know about copyrights for maps, but your argument is not good: You can't copyright a flower, but take a picture of that flower and the rights to the picture belong to you. Google is not preventing others from collecting mapping data, but they prevent them from copying the data Google has collected.