" 

 : Actually that decision leads me to believe the opposite. The article says that no ""expressive"" content can be copied. In this case, the choice of which companies to include, possibly the ordering of those companies (alphabetical would have been okay per the article, but is sorting by revenues okay?), and their choice in assigned rank to each company strikes me as ""expessive"" per the discussion in Implications. Also, under Relation with treaties it states, ""The standard for such originality is fairly low; for example, business listings have been found to meet this standard when deciding which companies should be listed and categorizing those companies required some kind of expert judgement."" Wouldn't the Fortune 1000 list be considered such a business listing?   "