this is pretty much the facts for US copyrights & fair use:

"Fair use" allows non-infringing copying of a copyrighted work for such purposes as comment, criticism, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research.

(a) Article I, s 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original and, thus, are not copyrightable. Although a compilation of facts may possess the requisite originality because the author typically chooses which facts to include, in what order to place them, and how to arrange the data so that readers may use them effectively, copyright protection extends only to those components of the work that are original to the author, not to the facts themselves. This fact/expression dichotomy severely limits the scope of protection in fact-based works. Pp. 1287-1290.

(b) The Copyright Act of 1976 and its predecessor, the Copyright Act of 1909, leave no doubt that originality is the touchstone of copyright protection in directories and other fact-based works. The 1976 Act explains that copyright extends to "original works of authorship," 17 U.S.C. s 102(a), and that there can be no copyright in facts, s 102(b). A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship." s 101. Thus, the statute envisions that some ways of selecting, coordinating, and arranging data are not sufficiently original to trigger copyright protection. Even a compilation that is copyrightable receives only limited protection, for the copyright does not extend to facts contained in the compilation. s 103(b). Lower courts that adopted a "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" test--which extended a compilation's copyright protection beyond selection and arrangement to the facts themselves--misconstrued the 1909 Act and eschewed the fundamental axiom of copyright law that no one may copyright facts or ideas.