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1.  

   of course they have your number

   

   ThwartedEfforts, Oct 4th, 2001 @ 6:06am

   
   

   If you have a US number, and they copyrighted the entire series from all zeros to 100,000,000,000, then they have every possible US telephone number. A large portion of those numbers can't be real numbers because of the way the number space is divided, but if they copyrighted the entire space, they have a better case for this not being a friviously copyrighting (only going after certain commonly used items).

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2.  

   Re: of course they have your number

   

   Anonymous Coward, Oct 4th, 2001 @ 7:44am

   
   

   of course, if you'd been paying attention, the whole point is that they haven't copyrighted the phone numbers. they copyrighted the DTMF sounds that the telephone system uses to encode your phone number... the fact that each "song" they copyrighted happens to match up to a particular phone number is coincidental (but still under copyright protection, which i think is exactly the point they're trying to make).

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3.  

   copyrightable?

   

   Ed, Oct 4th, 2001 @ 8:52am

   
   

   Things might be different today, but at least a few years ago, there still had to be an element of creativity, not just effort (aka "sweat of the brow"), to make something copyrightable. For this reason, telephone white pages were not eligible for copyright protection, and any other exhaustive enumeration of letters, numbers, tones, etc. should likewise not be copyrightable. I'm not sure how to reconcile that in cases where a "song" might be very short (think of the 4-note Intel jingle), but copyrighting all 4-note songs doesn't make sense.

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4.  

   Telephone white pages

   

   Phillip, Oct 4th, 2001 @ 3:39pm

   
   

   Well the telephone white pages in the UK are copyright our telephone monopoly. Nobody else is allowed to have any directory service which is why they charge us 50p (75c) per enquiry, or it may be less now. We also have to pay for post code information, and pretty much every thing else (paid for by us the taxpayer?) because of 'copyright'. Sad huh?
   
   Phillip.

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5.  

   

   Anonymous Coward, Feb 19th, 2008 @ 11:42am

   
   

   ture that

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