How are trap streets “the trick” if they are not copyrightable or enforceable under US law? Like the Supreme Court has specifically considered and dismissed this “one clever trick to keep people from copying lists of facts” because to allow it would completely undermine the idea of facts and figures not being copyrightable.
> Trap streets are not copyrightable under the federal law of the United States. In Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co. (1992),[3][4] a United States federal court found that copyright traps are not themselves protectable by copyright. There, the court stated: "[t]o treat 'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright ... If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated." (Id. at 733)
And yes the EU has the concept of “database rights” but notionally there is still supposed to be a creative step required in the selection or arrangement of records. So just a raw copy of the numbers in a telephone directory is theoretically not copyrightable, but a telephone book might be because of the creative/transformational step. It’s possible this might be such a low bar that it’s impossible to fail to clear, but, at least on paper you can’t copyright mere facts and figures either.
But either way it’s generally true that simple facts and figures are not protected and trap streets are a discredited and clumsy attempt to work around this.