I'm going through a trial with infoUSA right now, and they have informed me via their sales rep that I can't re-publish the data directly - that it's OK if I call the people up and ask them if they want to advertise on my site, but it's not OK if I just copy it out and paste it into my site. I haven't actually started my trial yet, so I haven't read the licensing agreement, but it is my understanding that copyrighting factual data is impossible. Basically, I'm thinking about putting together a niche directory, but the step of communicating with each entry seems a little time consuming for my project to be practical. Is it legal for them to prevent me from republishing factual data?
How would they know if you copy-paste the info or if you called them? Maybe they just have to say that.
Well, the downside would be that I use a bunch of data because I feel like it's illegal for them to prevent me from doing it, and then they sue me.
They certainly have some legal rights. I don't think they are claiming rights to the individual addresses, but rather their work of putting together a "collection of addresses" - otherwise you could have someone pay for a single CD and then make copies of it and resell them, or give them away for free. Your phone book is most likely copyrighted. I don't know what type of information you are planning on reprinting, but if it is just addresses that you could find on your own, it would probably be difficult for them to prove or claim infringement as long as your listings didn't happen to be an exact duplicate of addresses they supplied you with. Descriptions they wrote on a business would likely be protected. I guess if there data had some listings with misprints, and your listings happened to have their same exact mistakes, it might present a problem. I'm sure they spent a lot of money to collect all those addresses, and more importantly, they probably make a lot of money in selling them. They will probably see anyone who reprints their work as causing them financial harm.