Copyright status of AOL search logs?

Last month AOL caused something of a furor when well-meaning
internal
researchers posted search logs for the information science
community
to study.  They thought they had anonymized the logs
sufficiently by
converting screen names to random numbers, but enterprising
folks
around the world put up searchable databases and others
began finding
out individuals' identities.  More background:


http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060814-1.shtml

I'm curious whether AOL retains a copyright interest in
their search
logs, and whether they should have tried to shut down
mirrors and
searchable databases of the logs, such as this one:

http://www.aolsearch
database.com

Such an effort would be futile, as the dataset was mirrored
at
Internet speed.  But I'm still curious if AOL retains a
copyright
interest in this data.  Reasons that I can think of why they
would
not:

1) It's data.
2) AOL's own agents posted it to the Web:

http://www.gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/U500k_README.txt

3) However, those agents no longer work for AOL, which says
that if
properly vetted internally, the release would not have been
approved.

/rich



-- 
Rich Wiggins
richrichardwiggins.com

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