[akrymski]

EU protects a database creator if there has been a qualitative or quantitative "substantial investment" in obtaining, verifying, or presenting the content, regardless of creative expression.

In USA copyright requires a minimum degree of original creativity in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the data.

I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable. There's a rather large amount of effort involved in crawling and ranking the web - the PageRank itself should be copyrightable.

[dataflow]

> I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable.

I don't think a map is a good example. A picture is probably a better one. A map, by its very definition, is not a replica of any part of the original artifact. Not merely because a map is not the territory, but also because it's not even a direct, unaltered view of the thing. There is clearly some creativity required in putting together a map, since it requires you to decide what to include, what to leave out, what to exaggerate, what to distort, etc... as evidenced by maps of the same area looking vastly different.

By contrast, search engine results are stitchings of various pieces of the text on the page, verbatim. How much creativity that embidies is probably akin to that within a photo.

[whaleofatw2022]

Where it gets tricky is that, at least in past US case law, 'maps are facts' and thus cannot be copyrighted as easily (this is part of why published maps often have intentional, hopefully subtle errors in them) [0]

[0] - I believe a specific case was Nintendo vs Prima publishing, which was even involving a map of a fictitious construct.

[jamesfinlayson]

> this is part of why published maps often have intentional, hopefully subtle errors in them

Yes I remember reading a few years ago about the Royal Australian Navy trying to find Sand Island which I think was some tiny island marked on maps of part of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Australia - what they found was open ocean 1,100m deep, and concluded it was the map-maker's "mark".

[mattkrause]

The consensus was that Sandy Island was not a copyright “trap.” Some of the sightings may have been floating pumice from an undersea volcano, and the “confirmations” came from a chain of errors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Island,_New_Caledonia

[dataflow]

IIUC that particular case has details that don't fit into the general scenario I mentioned, and they affected its outcome.

[altcognito]

They definitely started blowing through that line when they started serving up content answers as results.

[ipaddr]

It's been over 20 years since the PageRank paper was released. We're past that point and they stopped using PageRank 15 years ago.