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That's not exactly true. The TOS usually applies to people crawling the severs and mining data. Still, there is no clear way to know how a court would rule on something like this; each case is different.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browse_wrap




You don't waive your copyright by having a robots.txt, and while I believe most people think Google style indexing and searching is fair use - that doesn't mean anything you do with the data is fair use.


User content on Facebook may not be copyrightable. If I make a list of my personal interests, I haven't necessarily produced a creative work by the standards of US law.

Check out this site (just found it via search): http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/


Correct- lists of facts without styling aren't something you can copyright. The specific form that they are printed in are copyrightable, but there is no IP created by a list of facts. Phone numbers, game scores, colors of rocks, etc... not copyrightable.


The courts have generally only required a minimum of creativity to make something copyrightable. Also sentences are surprisingly easy to mke unique- see http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2009/11/uniqueness-of-sent...




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