It appears that Ray Bellis <ray@bellis.me.uk> said:
On March 27, 1991, in a case that transformed the nascent online database publishing industry, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that there is no copyright protection for purely factual products such as a telephone directory white pages.
I wasn’t talking about US law…
Is there any case law where someone has asserted a database right for a DNS zone? It seems like a rather stupid thing to do. If someone asserted such a right, I would make sure not to infringe it by ensuring no entries from that database entered my DNS caches or other software. Also, I see that in a decision last year the ECJ required "substantial extraction" also caused "significant detriment" to the investment in the database. I'm having trouble coming up with a scenario in which copying even the entire thing would impair the investment unless they are going to assert that the structure of the names somehow gave away secrets about their business plans. R's, John