Sweat of the brow

[1][page needed] In a traditional English idiom, the sweat of one's brow refers to the effort expended in labour, and the value created thereby.

An early example of the "sweat of the brow" doctrine in UK law[7] was the leading case of Walter v Lane (1900) in which reporters took down shorthand notes of a series of speeches given by the Earl of Rosebery, and transcribed them, adding punctuation, corrections and revisions.

The House of Lords held that the reporters were indeed "authors", and hence entitled to copyright, on the basis of the skill, effort and time involved in preparing the text for publication.

However, for well over a hundred years UK courts did not adopt a literal reading of that requirement, instead holding that a significant expenditure of skill and labour in the creation of a new work was sufficient.

Consequently, even though there was no creative input, the skill, labour, and judgement of the authors was sufficient to make the papers original literary works.

Nonetheless, the court held that she had exercised sufficient labour and skill in translating and transcribing what the spirits told her, so she had a copyright in the resulting literary work.

Football DataCo asserted that these schedules were copyrighted works due to the skill and labour involved in their preparation, and that the company was given exclusive rights to license their reproduction.

"[11] A November 2023 Appeal Court judgement (THJ v. Sheridan, 2023) by Lord Justice Arnold clarified that, in the UK, no new copyright is created in making a photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain artwork.

[12][13] Prior to 2021, German law granted ancillary copyrights (Leistungsschutzrecht) due to the effort involved in the production or exploitation of creative works.

[14] In 2016, a regional court in Berlin ruled that digitized versions of public domain paintings were entitled to new copyrights due to the effort and expertise necessary to create the reproductions.