I don't think that something being a fact makes it exempt from copyright. Map data is copyrighted, and often has minor inaccuracies in order to indicate copyright infringement.
In the map case: if I make a map of the coast of Florida by:
- looking at maps A, B, and C
- drawing my own map based on what I learned
...then the publishers of A (B or C) can't come sue me for violating their copyright over the shape of the coast of Florida; they have copyright over their specific depiction of that shape but not the shape itself.
Once you move into all-digital datasets a lot of the grounding assumptions are no longer there (perfect reproduction is easy; the data is more abstract and may only really be representable in one way).