Wizard of Oz court ruling: putting parts of public domain back under copyright | Hacker News Reader

Wizard of Oz court ruling: putting parts of public domain back under copyright

techdirt.com

10 pointsgrellas7 comments

The headline is very misleading, in my reading.

The case here is not one of taking thing from the public domain and putting them under copyright (as happened, for example, when the copyright terms were adjusted to match the rest of the non-US world), but rather, a dispute about what is in the public domain and what is copyrighted.

The crux of this case is whether the attributes added to the film adaptation of a work of literature (not present in the work of literature) have a separate copyright term running from the release of the film (and not from the original publication of the book.)

grellas, am I reading this right?

This case presents a bizarre confluence of elements that have caused courts and commentators to go all over the board with it: you have a copyright on the 1909 book that has long since expired, you have a 1939 film that remains under copyright, you have publicity stills from the 1939 film that depict characters from the film and that are not under copyright, and you have an alleged infringer who crops the images from the public domain publicity stills and puts them on t-shirts along with tag lines from the copyrighted movie ("there's no place like home") and sells them for commercial gain.

The holding here states that the qualities of the characters as distinctively depicted in the 1939 movie are in themselves protected by copyright even though the original characters as depicted in the book are not.

You are correct that this, then, is the "crux of the case" and this is indeed a dispute about what is or in not in the public domain rather than one about a literal taking back of elements of the public domain. Nonetheless, the practical effect of the ruling is to make it hazardous to use public domain characters from older works of literature in new films if such characters have previously been depicted in any film that remains under copyright (which obviously limits what one can do with certain public domain materials on penalty of being sued for infringement).

Thanks, as always, grellas.

But is this really a new doctrine? I mean, clearly the character of Cinderella is in the public domain, but I assumed that the Disney representation was copyrighted by Disney, and that if I wanted to make my own (commercial) representation of Cinderella, I'd need to make sure mine doesn't resemble the Disney version too closely.

I think the saddest part of the article comes from the fact that future adaptations of the Wizard of Oz have to ensure that they are not to similar to the 1939 version, else they might be infringing.

How can this be promoting the progress of science and useful arts?

> the fact that future adaptations of the Wizard of Oz have to ensure that they are not to similar to the 1939 version...

That's not a fact, that's just one blogger's misinterpretation of one lawyer's opinion.

If the "character traits" are under copyright, and thus these shirts violate copyright, then how are the posters that the shirts are based on public domain? The posters contain the same character images, and even if they were not registered with the copyright office directly, I don't see why the claim on the shirts would not extend to the posters also?

> In case you didn't get that, if you were to create a movie Wizard of Oz entirely based on the book, if one of the actors does pretty much anything that suggests a similarity to the movie version, rather than the book version, it could be infringing. At the very least, this completely rules out any attempt to make a nod or homage towards the original film.

I don't think that is true at all, and I believe that this blogger is misinterpreting the law here. If Sam Raimi were to digitally put Judy Garland in his remake, that would be copyright infringement. But "nods and homages" should be fine, as long as the movies (music, screenplay, acting) are stylistically different. This is kind of guaranteed, since the original was made over 70 years ago and the new one is being directed in Sam Raimi and will be in 3D..

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