England and the United States have decided differently (england: yes, us: no) whether to allow copyright of lists of otherwise uncopyrightable information. The long term outcome has been a thought provoking natural experiment: the United States, with no such copyright allowance, has a thriving industry of competing databases of various kinds of publicly available information. The UK has no such thriving ecosystem. Or at least this was all according to a newspaper article a few years back. For all I know they may have since seen the light and banned copyright on databases.