Protecting trivially collectable collections of fact would serve no purpose that I can see...
Here, if the collection as a whole requires trivial effort to collect, it's not protected. It's the aggregate effort that counts. The problem with the MS tables is that from what has been said the aggregate has involved a lot of effort over many years.
Perhaps.
However: 1. The data in question is of a more scientific in nature than the facts about the world that law is presumably ment to protect so it might not apply at all. 2. Since Microsoft have intentionally published it in the US where no such protection exists, it could be argued that it have exhausted its right to protection because of this. After all everybody could import it itself from the US if they wanted. In the case of Wine and other open source software this is especially true because of the Internet.
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Patrik Stridvall