In practice it's not the combination that is copyrighted (you cannot claim copyright over a binary just because you zipped it, or over a movie because you re-encoded it, for instance).

It's the “actual creativity” inside. And it is a fuzzy concept.

Interesting.

From what I understand, copyright only applies to the original source code, GUI and bundled icon/sound/image files. Functionality etc. would fall under patent law. So the compiled code on your .ISO for example would not only be "just raw numbers" but uncopyrightable raw numbers.