Moreoever, the program code has been created from scratch. If you are ripping off 10,000 people that have put in the data for 20 CDs, that is not a trivial contribution for the community at large. Kaye should know. He claims that he entered at least two dozen records in Gracenote's CD database. While he's resigned that he no longer has any control over those records, he vows that it won't happen again.
Few protections exist for the time and money a company puts into creating a database.
Databases are protected by copyright, but only if they show some amount of originality in their organization. How much originality needs to be shown has been debated in court. 1991 Feist, a publisher of wide-area telephone directories, requested names and telephone numbers from Rural to include in its directory. Out of 11 telephone companies, Rural was the only one to refuse. Feist used Rural's white page listings to build its own directory.