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.aolsearchdatabase.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
rich[_at_]richardwiggins.com