Europe actually does have a few countries that claim that photographing or digitizing a public domain work recopyrights it. They also have neighboring rights and database rights regimes on top of that.

If you wanna know more, you should look at the one time the National Portrait Gallery threatened to sue Wikimedia[0] for having an archive of uncopyrighted material. It went nowhere - primarily because the US has soundly and firmly rejected the nonsense that "sweat of the brow" creates copyright. Hell, even the EU doesn't think you can recopyright public domain works this way. But the UK-hosted NPG is still asserting primacy of UK law over the whole Internet to this day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_...