“No Sweat of the Brow Copyright”
An important innovation during the evolution of Project Gutenberg was to clarify the notion of “authorship” and its critical role for establishing copyright. In early days, it was common to think that applying HTML markup, or reformatting, or spelling changes, qualified an item for a new copyright. Historically, some print publishers even claimed new copyrights simply for typesetting a new edition.
Today, we know US copyright is based on the creative expression of ideas through authorship. Markup and spelling changes do not qualify. As a result, Project Gutenberg volunteers are able to “harvest” public domain materials on the Internet, once they are determined to match public domain print materials. This is not a frequent occurrence, however, since most volunteers prefer to work on items that are not yet digitized.
Similarly, Project Gutenberg claims no copyright on the “sweat of the brow” labor which is applied to make eBooks from print sources. There were a few earlier items where such copyright was claimed erroneously, but this is no longer done.