Re: Superdrive 2000?

On Tue, Jun 05, 2018 at 07:21:36AM +0100, smf wrote:
>On 05/06/2018 00:48, Jim Brain wrote:
>>Even if Mark mis-remembered a few things, I am convinced the term 
>>"overlay" is significant from a legal perspective, regardless of how 
>>you define it.
>
>Imagine I produced a video overlay for Star Wars The Last Jedi, do you 
>think that gives me permission to distribute the video that is not 
>covered by the overlay? Do you think Disney would agree?

I believe that CMD must have made some kind of licensing agreement with 
Commodore, with some conditions.

A more appropriate analogy could be that manufacturers of physical 
products or video games enter licensing deals with the copyright holders 
of movie or cartoon characters. Surely also these contracts could 
contain additional conditions; we do not know, because the contracts are 
not public.

A more direct analogy could be "cover bands" who create variations of 
original songs. For music, there might exist some "compulsory licensing" 
rules that force the original copyright holders to sell a license. One 
example is the Finnish band Eläkeläiset (Pensioners). Their music could 
be considered an "overlay" of the original song. But in the copyright 
law, it would be a "derivative work", because the original melody is 
recognizable.

In the era of YouTube, the "video overlays" seem to have become a new 
"gray area", because there are many parody videos, which often are safe 
from takedown notices (maybe due to the Streisand effect, or because the 
US copyright law has an exception for parody). I recently learned that 
one of my favorite channels "Bad Lip Reading" started with a version of 
Rebecca Black's "Friday", which attracted lots of parodies back then.

	Marko