Actually, I'm pretty sure a phone book is not, in the US, in general, 
copyrightable.

I don't believe US law has any special protection for "collections of 
facts". The canonical introductory intellectual property class example, 
which happens to be about a phone book in fact, is Feist v. Rural 
Telephone Service. Which in fact even has it's own wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

Jonathan

Shawn Boyette wrote:
> Individual facts or datum are not copyrightable, but "collections of
> facts" -- particular expressions of data -- are. This is what makes
> phone books, databases, and the like subject to copyright.
>
> P.S. N.B. IANAL
>
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>   
>> Interestingly, outside the US it's somewhat more possible to claim copyright
>> on "factual data" than inside the US, Europe for instance has types of IP
>> and copyright protection for databases that the US does not.
>>
>> But basically, the answer is that nobody knows for sure, not even the
>> lawyers.
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>> Bryan Baldus wrote:
>>     
>>> On Tuesday, September 23, 2008 4:17 PM, Nate Vack wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> Huh. They claim copyright of these records. I'd somehow thought:
>>>> 1: The federal government can't hold copyrights
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> The page [1] states:
>>>
>>> "Copyright"
>>> "Records in the MARC Distribution Services originating with the Library of
>>> Congress are copyrighted by the Library of Congress for use outside the
>>> United States. Subscribers are granted copyright permission to selectively
>>> redistribute records outside the United States; contact LC prior to any
>>> distribution."
>>>
>>> So, in the U.S., they are not copyrightable, but outside the U.S. some
>>> copyright claim might be justified.
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>>>> 2: As purely factual data, catalog records are conceptually
>>>> uncopyrightable
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> For the most part, personally I would agree with this, at least for
>>> individual records (though some parts of the record, like the 520 summaries,
>>> might contain enough original creativity that could be considered
>>> copyrightable). Others might believe otherwise, at least as it pertains to
>>> the collection of the records as a whole--for example, OCLC's copyright
>>> claims on their database of records.
>>>
>>> ##########################
>>>
>>> On the Fred 2.0 records, aside from their age, I wish they were available
>>> in MARC 21 format rather than XML with NFC encoding. When I tried to use
>>> MarcEdit to convert the files from XML to MARC 21 (January 2007), I ran into
>>> issues with character encodings. The files also seemed to lack header lines
>>> like:
>>> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>>> <collection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim">
>>>
>>> [1] <http://www.loc.gov/cds/mds.html#lcaf>
>>>
>>> Thank you for your assistance,
>>>
>>> Bryan Baldus
>>> Cataloger
>>> Quality Books Inc.
>>> The Best of America's Independent Presses
>>> 1-800-323-4241x402
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> --
>> Jonathan Rochkind
>> Digital Services Software Engineer
>> The Sheridan Libraries
>> Johns Hopkins University
>> 410.516.8886 rochkind (at) jhu.edu
>>
>>     
>
>
>
>   

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu