Demonstration: a simple database that raises difficult questions

Consider the following simple collection of data.

Title	Year	Genre 1	Genre 2	Quote	Score	Comment
Reservoir Dogs	1991	Drama	Crime	“Why do I have to be Mr. Pink?”	8.5	Tarantino’s first and best
Fargo	1996	Crime	Comedy	“We’re not a Bank, Jerry.”	8.0	Overrated, but good
Napoleon Dynamite	2004	Comedy		“I caught you a delicious bass.”	5.0	When is the funny part?
Star Wars	1977	Sci-Fi	Adventure	“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”	10.0	The gold standard. Undefeated.
Aliens	1986	Sci-Fi	Action	“All right, we waste him. No offense.”	10.0	20 years old and still convincing
The Exorcist	1973	Horror	Thriller	“Fear the priest!”	10.0	The scariest movie ever, period
Excalibur	1981	Fantasy	Adventure	“That’s the only thing of yours I don’t want!”	9.5	Underrated, excellent, doesn’t deserve obscurity

• The Title column is a simple list of facts. These barely even qualify as facts. By itself it’s nothing but a list of titles, and nobody would argue that by making that list I should have exclusive use of it.
• The Year column is also a list of facts. This is somewhat more informative but it’s still difficult to imagine that I should be able to prevent anybody from using those two columns together. Any film fan could have written it.
• Now add Genre 1. This is somewhat more arbitrary and requires judgment on the part of the person making the classification, although it doesn’t require a great deal of imagination or creativity to put a film in that category (if you’ve seen it.) Nobody would argue that columns 1, 2, and 3 together belong to me.
• Genre 2 is where things get slightly more tricky. Each film has elements of both genres, but viewers could reasonably disagree as to the appropriateness of the second genre (or even the first). The second category requires a little more judgment on the part of the compiler.
• Quotes are an interesting item. They are “bare facts” in that they occur in the dialogue of each film; but selecting them requires additional creativity beyond simply knowing in general what the film is about. One might even argue that a little creativity is required to choose a representative quote. The list gets arguably more original with this, even though there’s been no original contribution from the compiler.
• Score is a fully personal judgment. There is often “convergence” among filmgoers here, but each score is still an individual creation of the scorer. More originality has entered the compilation, this time in the form of compiler-produced information.
• The Comments field consists of original, creative work. They’re just short phrases, and in real life it’s very questionable that these columns taken together could be considered sufficiently original for copyright or any other kind of protection. But what if they were each a sentence? Or three sentences?

Now imagine that there was an additional column, containing a full original review for each film. The reviewer would own the copyright to the review, and the entire compilation suddenly looks more like a protectible work.

This example illustrates that while a database can be defined with some precision, it’s often very difficult to decide what parts should be protected and which parts should not.