This sort of stuff has been around for a while. One of the big Supreme Court rulings on the copyrightability of datasets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural) concerned a company that got sued for copying 4000 entries from a competitor's phone book. They got busted because they'd unknowingly copied fake entries.
The Court ruled that information contained in Rural's phone directory was not copyrightable, and that therefore no infringement existed.
Prior to this case, the substance of copyright in United States law followed the sweat of the brow doctrine, which gave copyright to anyone who invested significant amount of time and energy into their work. At trial and appeal level the courts followed this doctrine, siding with Rural.