> You are wrong about that. It's a file with numbers. Which makes it a database or dataset and very much protected by copyright. That's why licenses are needed. For the phone book, things like open street maps, and indeed AI models.
This is only true in jurisdictions that follow the sweat of the brow doctrine, where effort alone without creativity is considered enough for copyright. In other places, such as the USA, collections of facts are not copyrightable and a minimal amount of creativity is required for something to qualify as copyrightable. The phone book is an example that is often used, actually, to demonstrate the difference.
This is only true in jurisdictions that follow the sweat of the brow doctrine, where effort alone without creativity is considered enough for copyright. In other places, such as the USA, collections of facts are not copyrightable and a minimal amount of creativity is required for something to qualify as copyrightable. The phone book is an example that is often used, actually, to demonstrate the difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow