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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Does this offer a sort of land-grab opportunity where anyone who has an original recording can remaster it, convert to mp3, then claim copyright over that "transformation" of the original?

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No but if you're big enough, you can get YouTube and other tech companies to enforce your non-existing right for you.

Big enough or just willing to fill out phony takedown requests, knowing there's never any consequence.

To answer your question specifically, no. A derivative work needs to contain newly created/copyrightable material for the work itself to be copyrightable

For more general answers, see this pamphlet from the US copyright office

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

No, because the original is still in the public domain. Copyright law is pretty good about defining “derivative works”, and someone’s remaster is not going to hold up as a copyrightable contribution.

While this is mostly correct, the mention of derivative works is a red herring; derivative works are copyrightable, they're just also subject to the copyright of the original.

Derivative works are relevant because they’re subject to the original copyright, yes? Please note I didn’t say all derivative works are not copyrightable; I’m saying that a basic remaster won’t even qualify as a derivative work.

A simple copy of remaster won’t cut it in the US, but if you did some restoration work then that might be enough. This would only work as a land grab if you owned the only extant copies of the original, otherwise people could just make copies of those.

There were a bunch of court cases about this, music radio, and rights payments.

As far as I know, restoration is insufficient to claim a derivative copyright in a public domain work because it lacks sufficient originality. To the extent you do a good job, your additions to the underlying public domain work are not your creative authorship. They are a restoration of the original author's authorship.

I believe that is why Peter Kuran (Trinity and Beyond) patented a photochemical restoration process for revitalizing the color in films. Because his other restoration work is not protectable.

Doesn't it have to be changed in some way? Changing the storage format doesn't change the actual work. I assume you're talking about the Fair Use clause where something has to be different enough from the original to be re-claimed as new?

Anyone else could create their own digital master though, so no.

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