Can information posted without a license and meant to be spread be assumed to allow commercial use?
<p>Our organization has a cyber threat intelligence server, which we use commercially. There are a number of feeds posted by various organizations or individuals which contain things like malicious IPs, phishing domains, etc which are meant to be used as blocklists. These are free and available to the public. However, in 9 cases out of 10 there is no explicit license attached, nor any explanation from the maker as to who is actually allowed to use the feed and for what purposes. Can we assume that we are allowed to use it? What steps could be taken to ensure it? Some of the owners of the feeds cannot be contacted despite several attempts. We are located in Canada.</p>

<p><strong>In the USA</strong>, pure Information is not copyrightable since <strong>Feist</strong> Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/499/340" rel="nofollow noreferrer">499 U.S. 340 (1991)</a>, in which the Supreme Court held (emphasis mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>57 [...] The white pages do nothing more than list Rural's subscribers in alphabetical order. This arrangement may, technically speaking, owe its origin to Rural; no one disputes that Rural undertook the task of alphabetizing the names itself. But <strong>there is nothing remotely creative about arranging names alphabetically</strong> in a white pages directory. It is an age-old practice, firmly rooted in tradition and so commonplace that it has come to be expected as a matter of course.  [...]
It is not only unoriginal, it is practically inevitable. This time-honored tradition <strong>does not possess the minimal creative spark required by the Copyright Act and the Constitution</strong>.</p>
<p>58 [...] As a constitutional matter, copyright protects only those constituent elements of a work that possess more than a <em>de minimis</em> quantum of creativity. Rural's white pages, limited to basic subscriber information and arranged alphabetically, fall short of the mark. As a statutory matter, <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101" rel="nofollow noreferrer">17 U.S.C. § 101</a> does not afford protection from copying to a collection of facts that are selected, coordinated, and arranged in a way that utterly lacks originality.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A list of bad areas on the internet sorted by the IP is just another list that is similar to 'subscribers of Rural' and could be seen as lacking originality like the white pages of a phone book.</p>

copyright intellectual-property