[ChicagoBoy11]

From the Wikipedia article that you linked:

>The United States rejected this doctrine in the 1991 United States Supreme Court case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service;[4] until then it had been upheld in a number of US copyright cases

(which is what I remembered from my IP law class ;-) )

[dahart]

Yes, that's correct, the Feist case was the first one rejected on those grounds, and found that "A mechanical, non-selective collection of facts (e.g., alphabetized phone numbers) cannot be protected by copyright." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_...)

But sweat of the brow doctrine still applies to collections of facts when some creative work has been done, and does strengthen a case when there has been more sweat.

The case of the celebrity net worth site is one that is not a mechanical reproduction of facts. They are not a phone book, they are doing research and estimating net worth using implications. Their work is not single-sourced, but based on what they say is a wide variety of sources, some of which may not be publicly available. Who knows, some of it might be unsubstantiated rumor, or even "creative guessing". Just on the face of it, there is arguably enough creative work in what they're doing to satisfy a copyright claim. I doubt they're interested, and I don't think it'd be easy. I don't speak for them, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't recommend it. But to my eyes, it's not out of the realm of possibility.

[ChicagoBoy11]

Completely agree - would be interesting to see it judged!

I've often thought about this in the context of data collected by major sports leagues. They sure are very vocal with their legalese about how they hold all rights to use any of the data that they collect, but I have a strong suspicion that if someone with deep pockets held their feet to the fire, they may not like the result. The PGATour's ShotLink data is an example that comes to mind.