A Question About Copyright

[leono]

How do you copyright something that is out of copyright, and therefore free to be used by anyone? For example, how was Walt Disney able to copyright the movies Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, etc. when these stories have been around for hundreds of years??

 

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[futhey]

There are legal definitions for these things that spell out what percentage of it you have to change for it to be considered a derivative work or a separate work, and legal precedents. These can be copyrighted separately.

Think of remakes and parodies, such as "Scary Movie". It just follows the basic story-line of the other movie without directly referencing that it is a parody of the original work, therefore it is considered a separate work.

However, if they had called or marketed it as a parody of Scream, they could have gotten into a bit of trouble.

If you take a written story that has genuinely moved into the public domain you can generally adapt it into a movie, song, play, etc. with little difficulty, if no party claims rights to the work.

 

[healthstatus]

Those old tales are in the public domain, so anyone can use them. Once Disney put them into animated film, they became Disney's work and then qualified for copyright protection. The old tale is still public domain, the Disney Movie is not.

 

[leono]

There are legal definitions for these things that spell out what percentage of it you have to change for it to be considered a derivative work or a separate work, and legal precedents. These can be copyrighted separately.

Think of remakes and parodies, such as "Scary Movie". It just follows the basic story-line of the other movie without directly referencing that it is a parody of the original work, therefore it is considered a separate work.

However, if they had called or marketed it as a parody of Scream, they could have gotten into a bit of trouble.

If you take a written story that has genuinely moved into the public domain you can generally adapt it into a movie, song, play, etc. with little difficulty, if no party claims rights to the work.

How does it work then if you want to keep it as-is like the story of Snow White, you want to turn it into an ebook to sell, would it need to be rewritten?

 

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[healthstatus]

You can't use character dialogue or images from Snow White, but if you go to the book store there are 20 different versions of Snow White, because the "tale" is public domain.