The law in GB and the US
Is financial data copyrighted? What the law protects in a dataset
Updated
The answer differs between the figures, the way they were arranged, and the work of collecting and checking them, and between the US and the UK.
Describe your financial dataset Statements, fundamentals, prices, filings parsed into tables: say what you hold, where it came from and how many years it covers, and we read it against the terms and rules on this site.
The figures themselves
In Feist, the US Supreme Court said that since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original and are not copyrightable. A share price, a revenue line or a ratio is a fact.
The arrangement
17 U.S.C. 103 gives a compilation's author copyright only in the material the author contributed, and section 3A of the UK's 1988 Act treats a database as original only where its selection or arrangement is the author's own intellectual creation.
The investment, in the UK
A UK database right exists where there was substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the contents. Its maker is whoever took that initiative and the risk, and extracting a substantial part without consent infringes it.
Secrets kept as secrets
US federal law protects financial information as a trade secret where its value comes from not being generally known, and the UK regulations ask that reasonable steps were taken to keep it secret.
That is why a buyer asks how the data was gathered before it asks the price: see what exchange and vendor terms keep for themselves.