Your examples are really wanting greater freedom to copy rather than about the distinction between data and creative work. Copyright is supposed to encourage people to make creative work, not encourage people to record existing facts. I think this distinction is important because creative work isn't actually necessary to anyone else - they could create their own different one if they wanted. But data might only have one correct value and if that was locked away by copyright, it would limit other people's ability to do things that can't be done with some different data.