But “progress” (interpreted by the courts as “creativity”) is what the Constitution and American IP law focuses on, not effort. It simply doesn’t matter how hard you work, it only matters how creative you are. Thus, putting huge energies into compiling phone book entries does not make that work copyrightable, because it isn’t creative. On the flip side, two minutes of typing on a blog could easily generate copyrightable content, even though the amount of effort was negligible. Effort does not distinguish the copyrightable from the non-copyrightable, but creativity does.

Minimal effort is indeed a requirement (it takes effort even to breathe, after all), but it is a minimal requirement as compared to the creativity necessarily required for copyright.