Recent decisions suggest that U.S. courts are more likely to protect an online database if the work involved was tilted towards the compilation of data itself as opposed to the technology used to gather it

Recent decisions suggest that U.S. courts are more likely to protect an online database if the work involved was tilted towards the compilation of data itself as opposed to the technology used to gather it. Or, perhaps, one might conclude that that judges are more likely to protect databases dealing with golf scores than they are those dealing with boats and taxes. Is there copyright protection in compiled data published online? As with most things of a legal nature related to the Internet, it all depends on the factual context. A number of recent U.S. court decisions have shed some light on this issue. In Assessment Technologies of WI LLC v. WIREdata Inc., Judge Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit sharply criticized a copyright owner for attempting to prevent the extraction of data from a database. Assessment Technologies (AT) developed a computer program called "Market Drive" to store and sort assessment data from the property tax assessments of municipalities. While AT owned the copyright in the program, the stored data was collected by municipal tax assessors. The information was in the public domain and subject to an "open records" law, which allows anyone to access it on payment of a fee to the municipality. When WIREdata, acting on behalf of real estate brokers, sought to extract and use this information, three municipalities refused to provide it. They cited concerns that such disclosure would violate AT's software copyright and make them liable for aiding copyright infringement.