I’m not really sure either that that is the crux of the judgment, or that your hypothetical follows. I’m less concerned about the fact that the selection was recognised as part of the ‘originality’ of the compilation than how that was used in the infringement analysis (see my more detailed comments in next post).

As for the students collating grades – well, I don’t necessarily agree – the grade collation might well fit within the recognised exception to the kind of analysis in IceTV on the relevance of preparatory work – namely, that work not directed towards the construction of a copyright work might not count. When I grade papers, it is to assign results to individual papers – not to create the compilation of grades.

111 The time and title information incorporated into the Weekly Schedules reflected a great deal of skill and labour on the part of Mr Healy and Ms Wieland. As we have explained, Ice, to the extent it reproduced time and title information from the Weekly Schedules, appropriated the skill and labour used by Nine to create the Weekly Schedules. Contrary to her Honour’s conclusion, the skill and labour in selecting and arranging programming should not be regarded as separate and discrete from the extremely modest skill and labour involved in setting down on paper the programs already selected and presenting them in the form of the Weekly Schedules. The skill and labour expended by Nine were part of a single process leading to the creation of the copyright work as the written record of Nine’s programming decisions and the associated program information.

I’m very uncomfortable with this argument. For example, you would own the copyrights on a list of student grades, since preparing those grades took “skill and labour… of a single process”. If the students took their returned and marked papers and collated the grades themselves they would infringe your copyright.