[ifore]

It seems that it was somewhat inevitable given the US vs Australian distinction on whether to protect Creativity vs Effort (years ago I investigated this rabbit hole when I had a client who wanted to set up a White Pages clone site by buying the data from someone who had digitised it [with a lot of manual entry!] by low-paid Indians. They were very disappointed when I told them to contact an IP lawyer because it was almost certainly going to get them sued)

I did cry a little at the court's assertion creating the huffman table required "a very great deal of hard work". Gather a corpus of databases you have lying around, count the occurrences of each byte value and apply a <50 line algorithm that has been around since the 1950s and is a pretty standard university assignment. "a very great deal of hard work" indeed.

Presumably division 4A / s47D would now allow the cloning of the data table if decided today -- are you aware of any post-1999 case law?