Effectively acknowledging that the contents of a database may have varying copyright (owner, public works, facts, etc), but that the database itself is given protection implicitly if the database is "original and the result of substantial investment".
This is why you find fake data in Google Maps, the Rare Record Price Guide http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0953260194 and so on. Because they are representations of databases and all the companies behind them have to do to have the protection is to prove that other representations of the data have been sourced from their database, which they do by pointing at the secret fake data that is part of the database.
Does that not exist? It offers protection to any entity that has compiled an original source of data at their expense.
The US does not recognize copyrights over databases. The issue though is that depending on the ads in question there may be creative elements.
For example, suppose I place an ad to rent my house out and include just info. Not likely protected but if I do it in iambic pentameter, probably is protected.
What this wouldn't prevent is someone scraping CL for facts (appartments for rent, x bed, y bath, z sq ft), extracting those facts, and arranging them in another order. That doesn't strike me as protectable in the US, even if it involves scraping directly from CL.
http://www.caret.cam.ac.uk/copyright/Page92.html
Effectively acknowledging that the contents of a database may have varying copyright (owner, public works, facts, etc), but that the database itself is given protection implicitly if the database is "original and the result of substantial investment".
This is why you find fake data in Google Maps, the Rare Record Price Guide http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0953260194 and so on. Because they are representations of databases and all the companies behind them have to do to have the protection is to prove that other representations of the data have been sourced from their database, which they do by pointing at the secret fake data that is part of the database.
Does that not exist? It offers protection to any entity that has compiled an original source of data at their expense.