Please try to keep in mind, these laws are old, and not being under the reign of a monarch is new. These issues will affect every former UK colony.
It is really not much different, functionally speaking, from a telephone number, an email address or a room number. Are telephone numbers copyrighted? Don't think so. Are email addresses copyrighted? I've never heard of such a thing.
Australia and NZ are still hashing it out, actually.
http://www.baldwins.com/australian-and-new-zealand-copyright-law-for-databases-compilations-and-directories/
And who pays for postal codes to be created/used in the first place? The Canadian taxpayer. That should make postal codes a "public good", owned collectively by the taxpaying Canadian public. Creating a free listing of postal codes, where anyone can look up postal codes, is a convenience, and a service rendered to the public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#Canada
"Permission to reproduce Government of Canada works, in part or in whole, and by any means, for personal or public non-commercial purposes, or for cost-recovery purposes, is not required, unless otherwise specified in the material you wish to reproduce."
And a good one too, since it is "free", and nobody profits from it.
The "otherwise specified" part would seem to be the $5000 Canada Post wants to charge for its directory. Which it has the right to do. Statistics Canada also charges for its data, one of the few places where government documents are not free. Why? Because information has value. The Do Not Call List has a trivial price attached to it, and has been exploited to high hell because foreign telemarketers can afford to do it and are not bound by our laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Do_Not_Call_List#Criticism
Besides, if search engines can index the entire f___ing Internet, without anyone crying "Oy! That's my copyrighted webpage you are indexing!",
Ok, now you're just starting to look silly and ill informed...
http://searchengineland.com/proposed-uk-law-would-immunize-search-engines-against-copyright-claims-33336
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/04/08/industry-google-afp-dc-idUSN0728115420070408
http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1457-Search-Engines-Indexing-and-Copyright-Law
http://www.blogstudiolegalefinocchiaro.com/wordpress/?p=258
how can a simple "Canadian postal code lookup function" be a breach of copyright? If the article is correct, the site in question didn't even copy the Postal Services postal code database. It built its own, from user contributions. I really don't see how "copyright" even figures into this case...
It's not the engine, it's the data. Postal codes were *authored*, there is no question about that.