In the US, yes, the selection and arrangement of facts _can_ be protected by copyright.
It needs to be an arrangement or presentation that involves a significant degree of creative choice, not an arrangement that is obviously inherent in or determined by the facts themselves. (For instance, an alphabetic arrangement of terms would obviously not be copyrightable either, but the order of a list of buildings ranked by prettiest might be).
The individual sports statistics are definitey not protected by copyright -- nobody can require me to get permission to tell you that Joe Blow has an RBI of X. But if you copy the entire database of sports statistics from someone, and present them in the same order/categories, those elements (selection and arrangement) _might_ be copyrightable -- it depends on the specifics and how well the lawyers make their case that the particular selection and arrangement involved were creative choices, not just obvious in the data itself.
In the U.S. , that you "applied meaningful resources to extrapolating" is completely irrelevant to copyright -- that it took lots of resources to assemble purely factual information still does not make them copyrightable. This is known as the 'sweat of the brow doctrine', and the courts in the U.S. decided that it did _not_ apply to copyright here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#US_copyright_...
It needs to be an arrangement or presentation that involves a significant degree of creative choice, not an arrangement that is obviously inherent in or determined by the facts themselves. (For instance, an alphabetic arrangement of terms would obviously not be copyrightable either, but the order of a list of buildings ranked by prettiest might be).
The individual sports statistics are definitey not protected by copyright -- nobody can require me to get permission to tell you that Joe Blow has an RBI of X. But if you copy the entire database of sports statistics from someone, and present them in the same order/categories, those elements (selection and arrangement) _might_ be copyrightable -- it depends on the specifics and how well the lawyers make their case that the particular selection and arrangement involved were creative choices, not just obvious in the data itself.
In the U.S. , that you "applied meaningful resources to extrapolating" is completely irrelevant to copyright -- that it took lots of resources to assemble purely factual information still does not make them copyrightable. This is known as the 'sweat of the brow doctrine', and the courts in the U.S. decided that it did _not_ apply to copyright here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#US_copyright_...