an excerpt,

UPDATE: IP attorney Michael F. Brown (great website — great “contact us” page) writes in:
I’ve had a number of people ask about this situation, and it seems to me that the “Bridgeman Art Library vs Corel” case (50 USPQ2d 1110) is exactly on point. It’s a Southern District of New York case from 1999. Bridgeman produced slides of public domain artworks, and sued Corel for including the photos on one of their CDROMs, claiming that they had expended a great deal of work to make their copies as accurate as possible.
In this case, plaintiff by its own admission has labored to create “slavish copies” of public domain works of art. While it may be assumed that this required both skill and effort, there was no spark of originality — indeed, the point of the exercise was to reproduce the underlying works with absolute fidelity. Copyright is not available in these circumstances.
That makes sense to me – otherwise, you would be essentially recreating copyright every time you fed something into a scanner and edited out the dust, or fixed the odd typo. Every copy of Huckleberry Finn would be subject to a different copyright, because somebody had to enter the text into a typesetter, proofread it, etc