No, but they might be able to avoid the lens entirely and do microlensing on a flat surface. For example, I could totally see the entire back of a cell phone be a light field camera, automatically throwing out data from where your fingers overlap the edges from holding it by using capacitive sensors in some way. I mean, we're probably talking twenty or thirty years out here, but that's the direction I see things heading eventually. And that would give you a believable stereo spread, not to mention much more usable resolution.
Nonsense. Plants don't do it efficiently because they occupy only a small area and must chemically store energy for an extended period of time, because they might not get much sunlight for six months out of the year.
Most of our power needs as a society don't require such long-term storage. The power that lights up a city is largely transient. It does not need to be stored except to provide a temporary reserve for when energy production is not available, and even then, only to the extent that we don't have enough of a superconducting power grid to bring in power from other areas that are capable of producing power. Similarly, our production capacity need not be self-contained within a single small area; we are capable of moving energy from place to place with relative ease.
We should have no difficulty powering the future with solar power. We just have to spend the money to build superconducting grids, solar towers, and other similar systems. The only reason we're not doing it on a large scale is that the folks designing the hardware haven't gotten the cost down to a point where it is cheaper than burning quarter-billion-year-old dead plants and animals yet.
Better battery technology would be useful for certain things, such as laptops, cars, etc., but it isn't essential. Given a superconducting power grid and ultracapacitors, it would not be catastrophic if you had to stop your car and plug in for ten seconds to recharge every couple of hours of driving. And that's possible with the power storage technology we have today, although the cost is still prohibitive.
The only thing we're really missing is infrastructure and capacity. There is no huge gaping hole in our energy tech picture. There is only a lack of resources to build what needs to be built.
I'm usually the sort of person who says that you should never blame the victims. That said, in this case, the victims' actions are so utterly over-the-top foolish that I'm not even sure I can make that argument.
If faced with this situation, anyone with an ounce of clue would properly summarize the situation as "This guy has threatened to expose these seminude pictures of me, and the only way I can stop him is to give him fully naked pictures of me." A person with a modicum of common sense would then realize that when he later exposes those photos, it will cause far more harm than if he exposes the photos he already has, and so would choose to call the police instead, or at least tell the perpetrator to f*** off.
I'm not saying that the guy isn't a dirtbag or that he shouldn't be punished for making the threats, but I would argue that anybody who fell for this scam is the sort of person who, when the gunman says, "Oh. I see I'm out of bullets. Could you hand me that box over there?" hands him the box. As such, they should be charged with aiding and abetting and should be banned from touching a computer until they can prove that they are responsible enough to use one properly.
There aren't any. That's why they're using hacks. Not every possible goal is necessarily achievable through legitimate, supportable means.
There are exactly two ways to do what they're doing legitimately: file bugs and hope Apple gives you an API for doing it and/or adds the feature to the OS, or get a job at Apple and add the feature to the OS yourself. All other approaches are inherently high-risk.
Either way, injecting your own threads into a running application and using those threads to binary-patch parts of OS-provided shared libraries inside the app's address space is not a legitimate way to do it. It isn't even a slightly sane way to do it. In fact, it is pretty much guaranteed to break with every major OS release, and even with some minor ones.
it's about getting people to demonstrate abilities that should be overwhelmingly obvious in use.
The problem is that it is highly unlikely for such abilities to exist in a form that is usable at will.
For example, the odds of being able to predict the future on command are slim. But a sizable percentage of people claim to have experienced dreams that are eerily predictive of the future. It seems likely that most or all of these can be explained away as coincidence, or as seeing patterns where non actually exists, but even if we assume that it is an actual ability, predicting the future is still not an ability that has any practical use, because in general, people can't control when or if they have dreams.
For another example, many people claim to know what other people are thinking at certain times. It is unlikely that anyone can know what other people are thinking all the time, or else their minds would be so cluttered with other people's thoughts that they would not have room for their own. So again, it seems likely that such an ability would not be the sort of thing that you could turn on or off on command, making it very, very difficult to prove, very likely to be dismissed as coincidence (rightly or wrongly), and very unlikely to be generally useful.
What do you think is the root cause of humans' obsession with believing in supernatural powers, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
Because almost everyone has, at one point in their life, experienced things they can't explain, like knowing who is at the door before you walk down, like repeatedly having phone calls in which the other person says, "I was just reaching for the phone to call you," and so on.
None of these things are proof of supernatural powers—they could just be a series of coincidences, or it could be that certain people are more likely to do certain things at certain times—but they all add up to a healthy skepticism towards the people who say, "There's no such thing as supernatural powers."
As for me, I've had experiences that are not so easily explained. I don't generally talk about them; no one would believe me if I did. Based on those experiences, I'm certain that some of our hypotheses about the way the universe operates are fundamentally unsound. But I'm pretty sure that none of it is beyond explanation, and that science will eventually catch up—maybe not in my lifetime or even in my won't-be-born-for-decades grandchildren's lifetime, but eventually. And that's the difference between me and people who believe in magic and fraudsters.
PHP's preg_replace et al seem to fit the bill, but they have the advantage of not requiring an ugly, hard-to-parse blob of mess in the middle of your code (because PHP's regex engine uses normal strings to hold the pieces of the regex).
Three batteries. However, if you have a cordless phone that has three cells soldered together and wrapped in shrink plastic, and you unplug the lead and plug in a new one that you bought at Wal-Mart, you replaced a battery even though you replaced three cells.
A battery (or, often, battery pack) is a unit of end-user (or at least maintenance technician) connection. It can contain one cell (e.g. a AA battery) or multiple cells (e.g. a laptop battery). What makes it a battery is that an average person can replace it as a unit without the need to solder wires or spot weld straps onto a cell.
Actually, the section that I was talking about (which also requires that you not perform any caching of proxied requests) doesn't require you to do any of those things, because you aren't actually storing the data. It's the section that covers pure IAPs (Internet Access Providers) rather than full-blown ISPs.
If you introduce caching, then yes, you have to handle take-down requests and lots of other pain.
But you do make a good point that this probably isn't something any sane person should want to do without on-staff legal counsel.:-D
I was assuming no caching. With caching, then 512(b) would presumably apply instead of 512(a). But then each user would presumably have to accept DMCA takedown requests. Better if no caching occurs.
It isn't clear whether (1) would fail. I would assume that any ISP (and indeed, very nearly any device) that can pass on traffic can also generate traffic. So presumably that same issue applies pretty broadly to anything resembling an ISP. I would assume that the burden would fall on the prosecution to sort out whether the request was made while acting as a proxy for a remote user or while acting on behalf of the local user, and that the presumption, in absence of proof to the contrary, would have to be that the request was merely being passed on.
I'd be more concerned about whether you could legitimately say that you were running such an app in good faith.
Depends. If it were used, for example, in the next version of the BitTorrent protocol (with no way to turn it off other than to not upgrade to newer versions of the apps in question), lots of folks would end up using it for legitimate purposes. If it were incorporated in a separate app or as a switchable feature of BitTorrent, not so much.
(a) Transitory Digital Network Communications.— A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider’s transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, or by reason of the intermediate and transient storage of that material in the course of such transmitting, routing, or providing connections, if—
(1) the transmission of the material was initiated by or at the direction of a person other than the service provider;
(2) the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider;
(3) the service provider does not select the recipients of the material except as an automatic response to the request of another person;
(4) no copy of the material made by the service provider in the course of such intermediate or transient storage is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and no such copy is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer period than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections; and
(5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.
The only question is whether you as an individual can qualify as a "service provider", but if the EFF's interpretation is correct, anyone falling into the above exemption would inherently qualify.
That said, I would not want to be the person who was being sued over using such a service. You'd presumably have to convince a judge that your purpose for using the software in the first place was something other than engaging in or facilitating copyright infringement.... Good luck with that.
By compulsory license, I mean that he used a special class of copyright license that by law is limited to near-exact copies of the original. Therefore, either his work was different enough to be a derivative work, in which case his compulsory license doesn't cover it (and thus, he has been selling unlicensed works of copyright infringement), or it isn't, in which case because of the law governing compulsory licensing, his arrangement is not protected by copyright.
Fox paid Universal (Sir Mix-A-Lot's publisher) or a PRO that represents them. They did not pay Coulton and claim that their license to the original also grants them access to his arrangement because his derivative work was prepared using a compulsory license and therefore his arrangement is not protected by copyright.
In order for Fox to be on the wrong side of the law (because he should have copyright on his original melody), it would be necessary to also show that Coulton was also on the wrong side of the law when he created his version of the song (because his license did not cover the act of creating anything that would qualify as a derivative work under Title 17), which would then open him up to a lawsuit from Universal.
And it is unclear how the courts would rule. They could easily side with Fox, asserting that his choice to use a compulsory license represents an implied waiver of copyright protection. Or they could side with Coulton, asserting that his choice to use a compulsory license was clearly intended (by Coulton) to be a license to the lyrics alone, in which case his use of the lyrics was an inappropriate use of the compulsory license, and pretty much everybody involved is infringing.
In the case of a song arrangement, that is essentially useless, unless an entirely new section were inserted into the song.
In this case, an entirely new melody was inserted into the song.
And again, fundamentally, even if Coulton went through the effort of negotiating a license for which he was able to assert a copyright interest in his composition (for which there is zero evidence and any number of contrary indications from Coulton himself), nothing would prohibit Glee from a note-for-note cover on their show.
Correct, but only if they paid the appropriate licensing. But you are correct that since he did not properly license the lyrics for use in a new work, his choices are rather limited. He might be able to win a lawsuit for royalties from Fox, but by doing so, he would be admitting that his compulsory license was improper, at which point he would likely get sued for back-royalties and illegal combination into a derivative work by Universal. He might or might not come out ahead, and even if he did, it would be a protracted legal battle.
Please identify the "ludicrous assertions", because it's clear that you simply do not understand and just want to play expert rather than learn anything.
Your ludicrous assertion was that an authorized derivative work does not get copyright protection. My response was that yes, it does, and that the copyright belongs to the creator of the derivative, barring any contract to the contrary. (Since a compulsory license isn't legally considered a derivative work, that statement is correct.) After several pages of arguing, you've come around to that same statement. Even here, you're basically arguing that "Yeah, but contracts are always written with copyright assignment clauses," which may be true (I have no idea), but is an entirely separate and unrelated question that falls under contract law, not copyright law.
It's quite possible that you know this stuff and are merely stating your case so imprecisely that I'm repeatedly unable to understand what your point is, but either way, your statements have come across as utterly bewildering and contrary to what the law says even though your conclusion was, in fact, correct (because of additional details that I did not have at the time that I made my original comment).
It's not incorrect. There are virtually no circumstances under which an unauthorized derivative work can stand on its own
Your original statement did not include the word "unauthorized". With that word, your statement becomes mostly correct. Your previous statement used the word "authorized". With that word, your statement was entirely wrong.
Apparently he didn't actually have permission. He had a mechanical license, which by definition, does not allow the creation of works that differ melodically from the original. So there are two ways the courts could interpret this:
Universal's allowance of the Coulton variant constitutes tacit acceptance that they don't consider it to be different in character from the original (a.k.a. Fox's bizarro-world interpretation), in which case his arrangement of the song falls into a very special class of arrangement that isn't protected by copyright by virtue of the fact that it was created under compulsory licensing rules rather than under the terms of an actual agreement between the parties involved, or
Universal's lack of a lawsuit does not constitute tacit acceptance that his arrangement is not in violation of their copyright (but rather, mere unwillingness to bother suing), in which case Coulton owns the copyright for the melody, did not have a legal right to record the combination of that melody with the original lyrics, and is technically in violation of copyright for every copy he has ever sold to date.
In the first interpretation, he has no case. In the second interpretation (which IMO is more likely), he could ostensibly get money out of Fox, but only at the risk of getting then sued by Universal for his prior releases as revenge for having deprived them of royalties from Fox. Sadly, it's probably a no-win.
The best he could hope for is to get an activist judge and go for a Lanham Act case against Fox, but it would be unlikely to hold up on appeal, if Dastar v. Fox is any indication of the court's current leanings.
You're treating the terms "cover" and "compulsory mechanical license" as though they are synonymous. They are not. Yes, if you have a limited license that does not permit you to make changes, clearly your lack of changes cannot be protected by copyright because you can't copyright nothing.
That said, even within your very narrow definition of a cover, that may or may not be the case. It isn't clear how the courts would rule with respect to additions that fall outside the scope of "the arrangement", e.g. an added guitar solo. Unlike "the arrangement" which explicitly is unprotected, such a solo is a separable piece of artistic creation. I could honestly see the courts go either way on that.
EIther way, the recording itself is not derivative of the original recording, and there are indications that they may have used his actual recording.
That said, if this Coulton guy truly used a mechanical license, then technically his recording was infringing on the original copyright, because he substantially changed the character of the work. I had been operating under the assumption that his derivative was an authorized derivative work, but it sounds like perhaps this was not the case. In principle, he should follow up with Universal and request permission to copyright his arrangement, but at this point, it is probably too late to usefully fight it. He screwed up pretty badly when he used a compulsory mechanical license for something that a mechanical license doesn't actually cover. At best, he would end up in a three-way lawsuit with him suing Fox for royalties and Universal suing him for royalties, and it would be a nasty mess.
If it is an authorized derivative work, it's still the original artist (or label) who possesses the copyright.
Incorrect. See 17 USC section 103. The original artist has the copyright in the original work, and that copyright is not altered in any way by the existence of the derivative work. The creator of the derivative has the copyright on the remainder. The only situations in which this is not the case are either when the license to the original work contains an explicit copyright assignment clause or, as you note, when compulsory licensing is involved.
An original work containing a minimal degree of creative expression may generate a new copyright. A derivative work does not necessarily establish a new copyright. If it is "not transformative enough for fair use", which is a vacuous standard, since transformation is a factor and not an element, then you have a real problem with originality.
Okay, I'm just going to stop you right here. 17 U.S.C. section 103 says:
"(b) The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material."
From this, we can conclude that in fact, derivative works are protected by copyright unless the new material is not sufficiently creative to qualify for copyright protection on its own. Given that the bar for copyright protection is very, very low, this basically means that derivative works inherently enjoy copyright protection. But if you need further proof, look at Title 17's definition of "derivative work":
A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a “derivative work”.
So a derivative work is considered an original work of authorship, and is therefore protected in the same way that any other work of authorship is protected, with the only real caveat being that it does not affect the copyright duration of the content that was borrowed.
Section 103 complements section 102: A compilation or derivative work is copyrightable if it represents an “original work of authorship” and falls within one or more of the categories listed in section 102. Read together, the two sections make plain that the criteria of copyrightable subject matter stated in section 102 apply with full force to works that are entirely original and to those containing preexisting material.
Note that section 102 basically says that musical works, literary works, etc. are protected by copyright, and that's pretty much the extent of that section.
Further, even if the content were appropriated illegally (it was not in this case), the new content would still enjoy copyright protection to the extent that it is separable from the original content:
"(a) The subject matter of copyright as specified by section 102 includes compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully."
Notice that it says "any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully". So any part of the work in which the preexisting material was not used is still protected. It is unlikely that an illegal appropriation of lyrics could taint the copyright on the music. I'm not aware of any case law on that particular issue, but again, the subject is completely irrelevant because permission was given, which means that paragraph (a) does not apply, and paragraph (b) does, which means copyright is in full force.
So I've provided hard evidence straight out of Title 17 that supports my statements. Please provide some real, factual basis for your ludicrous assertions that run contrary to pretty much everything I've ever read on the subject, or else I will assume you're just trolling, and will consider the matter closed.
Slashdot Mirror
So only 16 years, then.... The PPC750 was introduced in 1997. Not quite 20, but closer to 20 than to "recent"....
No, but they might be able to avoid the lens entirely and do microlensing on a flat surface. For example, I could totally see the entire back of a cell phone be a light field camera, automatically throwing out data from where your fingers overlap the edges from holding it by using capacitive sensors in some way. I mean, we're probably talking twenty or thirty years out here, but that's the direction I see things heading eventually. And that would give you a believable stereo spread, not to mention much more usable resolution.
Nonsense. Plants don't do it efficiently because they occupy only a small area and must chemically store energy for an extended period of time, because they might not get much sunlight for six months out of the year.
Most of our power needs as a society don't require such long-term storage. The power that lights up a city is largely transient. It does not need to be stored except to provide a temporary reserve for when energy production is not available, and even then, only to the extent that we don't have enough of a superconducting power grid to bring in power from other areas that are capable of producing power. Similarly, our production capacity need not be self-contained within a single small area; we are capable of moving energy from place to place with relative ease.
We should have no difficulty powering the future with solar power. We just have to spend the money to build superconducting grids, solar towers, and other similar systems. The only reason we're not doing it on a large scale is that the folks designing the hardware haven't gotten the cost down to a point where it is cheaper than burning quarter-billion-year-old dead plants and animals yet.
Better battery technology would be useful for certain things, such as laptops, cars, etc., but it isn't essential. Given a superconducting power grid and ultracapacitors, it would not be catastrophic if you had to stop your car and plug in for ten seconds to recharge every couple of hours of driving. And that's possible with the power storage technology we have today, although the cost is still prohibitive.
The only thing we're really missing is infrastructure and capacity. There is no huge gaping hole in our energy tech picture. There is only a lack of resources to build what needs to be built.
Maybe it's drugs for Staples employees. I think if I had to work even a single day in retail, I'd want to smoke something....
He's one of my former coworkers. If he asked me any of those things, I'd be seriously creeped out. :-)
I'm usually the sort of person who says that you should never blame the victims. That said, in this case, the victims' actions are so utterly over-the-top foolish that I'm not even sure I can make that argument.
If faced with this situation, anyone with an ounce of clue would properly summarize the situation as "This guy has threatened to expose these seminude pictures of me, and the only way I can stop him is to give him fully naked pictures of me." A person with a modicum of common sense would then realize that when he later exposes those photos, it will cause far more harm than if he exposes the photos he already has, and so would choose to call the police instead, or at least tell the perpetrator to f*** off.
I'm not saying that the guy isn't a dirtbag or that he shouldn't be punished for making the threats, but I would argue that anybody who fell for this scam is the sort of person who, when the gunman says, "Oh. I see I'm out of bullets. Could you hand me that box over there?" hands him the box. As such, they should be charged with aiding and abetting and should be banned from touching a computer until they can prove that they are responsible enough to use one properly.
There aren't any. That's why they're using hacks. Not every possible goal is necessarily achievable through legitimate, supportable means.
There are exactly two ways to do what they're doing legitimately: file bugs and hope Apple gives you an API for doing it and/or adds the feature to the OS, or get a job at Apple and add the feature to the OS yourself. All other approaches are inherently high-risk.
Either way, injecting your own threads into a running application and using those threads to binary-patch parts of OS-provided shared libraries inside the app's address space is not a legitimate way to do it. It isn't even a slightly sane way to do it. In fact, it is pretty much guaranteed to break with every major OS release, and even with some minor ones.
The problem is that it is highly unlikely for such abilities to exist in a form that is usable at will.
For example, the odds of being able to predict the future on command are slim. But a sizable percentage of people claim to have experienced dreams that are eerily predictive of the future. It seems likely that most or all of these can be explained away as coincidence, or as seeing patterns where non actually exists, but even if we assume that it is an actual ability, predicting the future is still not an ability that has any practical use, because in general, people can't control when or if they have dreams.
For another example, many people claim to know what other people are thinking at certain times. It is unlikely that anyone can know what other people are thinking all the time, or else their minds would be so cluttered with other people's thoughts that they would not have room for their own. So again, it seems likely that such an ability would not be the sort of thing that you could turn on or off on command, making it very, very difficult to prove, very likely to be dismissed as coincidence (rightly or wrongly), and very unlikely to be generally useful.
Because almost everyone has, at one point in their life, experienced things they can't explain, like knowing who is at the door before you walk down, like repeatedly having phone calls in which the other person says, "I was just reaching for the phone to call you," and so on.
None of these things are proof of supernatural powers—they could just be a series of coincidences, or it could be that certain people are more likely to do certain things at certain times—but they all add up to a healthy skepticism towards the people who say, "There's no such thing as supernatural powers."
As for me, I've had experiences that are not so easily explained. I don't generally talk about them; no one would believe me if I did. Based on those experiences, I'm certain that some of our hypotheses about the way the universe operates are fundamentally unsound. But I'm pretty sure that none of it is beyond explanation, and that science will eventually catch up—maybe not in my lifetime or even in my won't-be-born-for-decades grandchildren's lifetime, but eventually. And that's the difference between me and people who believe in magic and fraudsters.
*shrugs*
It's a lot easier to add a function with a different name that calls that function than it is to make Perl not look like line noise. :-)
Haxies? Really? They're not built with public APIs, and they inject arbitrary code into running applications. And you wonder why they break regularly?
Partially Encrypted Regex Language?
PHP's preg_replace et al seem to fit the bill, but they have the advantage of not requiring an ugly, hard-to-parse blob of mess in the middle of your code (because PHP's regex engine uses normal strings to hold the pieces of the regex).
Three batteries. However, if you have a cordless phone that has three cells soldered together and wrapped in shrink plastic, and you unplug the lead and plug in a new one that you bought at Wal-Mart, you replaced a battery even though you replaced three cells.
A battery (or, often, battery pack) is a unit of end-user (or at least maintenance technician) connection. It can contain one cell (e.g. a AA battery) or multiple cells (e.g. a laptop battery). What makes it a battery is that an average person can replace it as a unit without the need to solder wires or spot weld straps onto a cell.
Actually, the section that I was talking about (which also requires that you not perform any caching of proxied requests) doesn't require you to do any of those things, because you aren't actually storing the data. It's the section that covers pure IAPs (Internet Access Providers) rather than full-blown ISPs.
If you introduce caching, then yes, you have to handle take-down requests and lots of other pain.
But you do make a good point that this probably isn't something any sane person should want to do without on-staff legal counsel. :-D
I was assuming no caching. With caching, then 512(b) would presumably apply instead of 512(a). But then each user would presumably have to accept DMCA takedown requests. Better if no caching occurs.
It isn't clear whether (1) would fail. I would assume that any ISP (and indeed, very nearly any device) that can pass on traffic can also generate traffic. So presumably that same issue applies pretty broadly to anything resembling an ISP. I would assume that the burden would fall on the prosecution to sort out whether the request was made while acting as a proxy for a remote user or while acting on behalf of the local user, and that the presumption, in absence of proof to the contrary, would have to be that the request was merely being passed on.
I'd be more concerned about whether you could legitimately say that you were running such an app in good faith.
Depends. If it were used, for example, in the next version of the BitTorrent protocol (with no way to turn it off other than to not upgrade to newer versions of the apps in question), lots of folks would end up using it for legitimate purposes. If it were incorporated in a separate app or as a switchable feature of BitTorrent, not so much.
U.S.C. Title 17 Section 512(a) would seem to apply:
The only question is whether you as an individual can qualify as a "service provider", but if the EFF's interpretation is correct, anyone falling into the above exemption would inherently qualify.
That said, I would not want to be the person who was being sued over using such a service. You'd presumably have to convince a judge that your purpose for using the software in the first place was something other than engaging in or facilitating copyright infringement.... Good luck with that.
By compulsory license, I mean that he used a special class of copyright license that by law is limited to near-exact copies of the original. Therefore, either his work was different enough to be a derivative work, in which case his compulsory license doesn't cover it (and thus, he has been selling unlicensed works of copyright infringement), or it isn't, in which case because of the law governing compulsory licensing, his arrangement is not protected by copyright.
Fox paid Universal (Sir Mix-A-Lot's publisher) or a PRO that represents them. They did not pay Coulton and claim that their license to the original also grants them access to his arrangement because his derivative work was prepared using a compulsory license and therefore his arrangement is not protected by copyright.
In order for Fox to be on the wrong side of the law (because he should have copyright on his original melody), it would be necessary to also show that Coulton was also on the wrong side of the law when he created his version of the song (because his license did not cover the act of creating anything that would qualify as a derivative work under Title 17), which would then open him up to a lawsuit from Universal.
And it is unclear how the courts would rule. They could easily side with Fox, asserting that his choice to use a compulsory license represents an implied waiver of copyright protection. Or they could side with Coulton, asserting that his choice to use a compulsory license was clearly intended (by Coulton) to be a license to the lyrics alone, in which case his use of the lyrics was an inappropriate use of the compulsory license, and pretty much everybody involved is infringing.
In this case, an entirely new melody was inserted into the song.
Correct, but only if they paid the appropriate licensing. But you are correct that since he did not properly license the lyrics for use in a new work, his choices are rather limited. He might be able to win a lawsuit for royalties from Fox, but by doing so, he would be admitting that his compulsory license was improper, at which point he would likely get sued for back-royalties and illegal combination into a derivative work by Universal. He might or might not come out ahead, and even if he did, it would be a protracted legal battle.
Your ludicrous assertion was that an authorized derivative work does not get copyright protection. My response was that yes, it does, and that the copyright belongs to the creator of the derivative, barring any contract to the contrary. (Since a compulsory license isn't legally considered a derivative work, that statement is correct.) After several pages of arguing, you've come around to that same statement. Even here, you're basically arguing that "Yeah, but contracts are always written with copyright assignment clauses," which may be true (I have no idea), but is an entirely separate and unrelated question that falls under contract law, not copyright law.
It's quite possible that you know this stuff and are merely stating your case so imprecisely that I'm repeatedly unable to understand what your point is, but either way, your statements have come across as utterly bewildering and contrary to what the law says even though your conclusion was, in fact, correct (because of additional details that I did not have at the time that I made my original comment).
Your original statement did not include the word "unauthorized". With that word, your statement becomes mostly correct. Your previous statement used the word "authorized". With that word, your statement was entirely wrong.
Slight correction. He had a compulsory mechanical license, which by definition, does not allow....
Apparently he didn't actually have permission. He had a mechanical license, which by definition, does not allow the creation of works that differ melodically from the original. So there are two ways the courts could interpret this:
In the first interpretation, he has no case. In the second interpretation (which IMO is more likely), he could ostensibly get money out of Fox, but only at the risk of getting then sued by Universal for his prior releases as revenge for having deprived them of royalties from Fox. Sadly, it's probably a no-win.
The best he could hope for is to get an activist judge and go for a Lanham Act case against Fox, but it would be unlikely to hold up on appeal, if Dastar v. Fox is any indication of the court's current leanings.
You're treating the terms "cover" and "compulsory mechanical license" as though they are synonymous. They are not. Yes, if you have a limited license that does not permit you to make changes, clearly your lack of changes cannot be protected by copyright because you can't copyright nothing.
That said, even within your very narrow definition of a cover, that may or may not be the case. It isn't clear how the courts would rule with respect to additions that fall outside the scope of "the arrangement", e.g. an added guitar solo. Unlike "the arrangement" which explicitly is unprotected, such a solo is a separable piece of artistic creation. I could honestly see the courts go either way on that.
EIther way, the recording itself is not derivative of the original recording, and there are indications that they may have used his actual recording.
That said, if this Coulton guy truly used a mechanical license, then technically his recording was infringing on the original copyright, because he substantially changed the character of the work. I had been operating under the assumption that his derivative was an authorized derivative work, but it sounds like perhaps this was not the case. In principle, he should follow up with Universal and request permission to copyright his arrangement, but at this point, it is probably too late to usefully fight it. He screwed up pretty badly when he used a compulsory mechanical license for something that a mechanical license doesn't actually cover. At best, he would end up in a three-way lawsuit with him suing Fox for royalties and Universal suing him for royalties, and it would be a nasty mess.
Incorrect. See 17 USC section 103. The original artist has the copyright in the original work, and that copyright is not altered in any way by the existence of the derivative work. The creator of the derivative has the copyright on the remainder. The only situations in which this is not the case are either when the license to the original work contains an explicit copyright assignment clause or, as you note, when compulsory licensing is involved.
Okay, I'm just going to stop you right here. 17 U.S.C. section 103 says:
From this, we can conclude that in fact, derivative works are protected by copyright unless the new material is not sufficiently creative to qualify for copyright protection on its own. Given that the bar for copyright protection is very, very low, this basically means that derivative works inherently enjoy copyright protection. But if you need further proof, look at Title 17's definition of "derivative work":
So a derivative work is considered an original work of authorship, and is therefore protected in the same way that any other work of authorship is protected, with the only real caveat being that it does not affect the copyright duration of the content that was borrowed.
But just to further support that point, here's what House Report 94-1746 says:
Note that section 102 basically says that musical works, literary works, etc. are protected by copyright, and that's pretty much the extent of that section.
Further, even if the content were appropriated illegally (it was not in this case), the new content would still enjoy copyright protection to the extent that it is separable from the original content:
Notice that it says "any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully". So any part of the work in which the preexisting material was not used is still protected. It is unlikely that an illegal appropriation of lyrics could taint the copyright on the music. I'm not aware of any case law on that particular issue, but again, the subject is completely irrelevant because permission was given, which means that paragraph (a) does not apply, and paragraph (b) does, which means copyright is in full force.
So I've provided hard evidence straight out of Title 17 that supports my statements. Please provide some real, factual basis for your ludicrous assertions that run contrary to pretty much everything I've ever read on the subject, or else I will assume you're just trolling, and will consider the matter closed.