The author apparently did not intend widespread readership:
> Whoever is out there, please stop clicking my link. I used to get 10 views a day from Vtuber wannabes and it's now a weekday. I don't even consider it a good enough summary! I thought the 60 views yesterday on the post was good, and now it's a hundred times that! What. Is. Happening.
> Seriously, this is weird. I already got two pingbacks from suspicious sites stealing my post. Joke's on them though, I'm constantly editing it when I have time.
> This is (initially) a copy of Guderian2nd’s table on the discussion thread on Spacebattles with a bit of cleanup. I’ve rewritten most of the notes to be more concise as I track the updates myself, where I can.
How is it theft? The original source is prominently cited, the author of the blog post is an active participant to the original discussion, the whole point of the post is to collect and summarize various sources in one place.
IANAL, but copying this table in the way they did seems OK under US copyright law.
In the US, some compilations cannot be copyrighted and some can.
Before a Supreme Court decision called Feist, copyright could be based on either "sweat of the brow" or creativity or both. Sweat of the brow is the work of taking data from original sources and putting it together. Creativity is something you add, like choosing what to include. (If I make a mere list of all restaurants at Disneyworld, that's sweat of the brow. If I make a list of the restaurants that are worth visiting, that's creative.)
The Supreme Court decision was about one company copying another company's white pages phone book. (White pages are the simple name/number listings.) The court said sweat of the brow isn't enough. There must be some amount of creativity. It's a low bar, but it has to be there. So they said the white pages cannot be copyrighted, and copying the entire thing is allowed.
About these LK-99 tables, the "Notes" and "Reliability of Claim" columns of the original table look creative to me. So I'd guess the table can be copyrighted. But the copy of the table didn't include those columns. It just included the factual data, and I think that's allowed.
I did, there's nothing about including a citation to the original making something fair use. Although if I cite some work using its title like so
Person *et al*(2023). "The Unbearable Lightness of Tardigades", *Little Creatures*, 27, 100-110
Then even though the title is really clever and creative copying it into my citation list is still fair use.
EDIT: I guess you could argue that the absence or presence of a citation is a factor in the character of the use or the use's effect on the market value of the original with a straight face but it's very, very much not going to be either necessary or sufficient for either of those tests.
