iamsalman offers a great response. Legally (and conceptually) there is the idea of a collection, a compilation being valuable in and on itself: this has been enforced to prevent people from selling phone books and TV programs without paying the original ‘compilers’, phone companies and TV stations, not as operators but original authors of an exhaustive description. Collecting changes useless information into, anecdotes, into a usable product: that’s the whole point of those companies, they (presumably by contract) guarantee a return rate that makes them economically sound; that changes the nature of ‘looking around’.

This idea is essential to all the creep factor around Google’s recurrent controversy: the problem is not taking street pictures, but guaranteeing that any house can be seen by anyone; it's not to murmur in your boss's ear ‘that’s the sub-commissioner in grey’ but potentially matching anyone’s face to their full public history. This is what made every page of a phone book precious, and every post-it with a phone number on it worthless.