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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

There's a comment in the twitter thread that helps to explain why there are multiple color versions of the comics: From the Wikipedia page on Paws Inc:

In 1994, the company purchased all rights to the Garfield comic strips from 1978 to 1993 from United Feature Syndicate, although United still holds the original black-and-white daily strips and original color Sunday strips. The full-color daily strips and recolored Sunday strips are copyrighted to Paws as they are considered a different product.

So maybe it's down to copyright law that the strips have differing colors (and that the coloring is chosen to be completely over the top to ensure it can be claimed to be different enough from the other versions owned by other companies?)

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I see this kind of argument come up a lot when talking about copyrights and patents. This is not how that works.

If someone creates a derivative work (e.g. crazy colors), that new person does own the copyright in the new "crazy colors" version, but they don't own the copyright to the black and white version. However, the new crazy colors version contains the rights of both the old and the new author, so that in order to publish the crazy color version, they would have to obtain a licence to the original version or else be infringing.

In short, the new version has two rights, owned by two different people, not one.

> If someone creates a derivative work (e.g. crazy colors), that new person does own the copyright in the new "crazy colors" version, but they don't own the copyright to the black and white version.

I don't think that is true at all - as far as I know, copyright on a derived work belongs entirely to the copyright owner of the original work.

If I create and sell prints of a Game of Thrones character, I am infringing HBO's copyright, and any money I make are owed to HBO legally. If you then create T-Shirts with my print and sell those, you are also infringing HBO's copyright, and all the money you make is also HBO's legally - you don't owe me 1 cent, since I had no right to copy HBO's work in the first place. If HBO wants to sell T-shirts with my print, they don't owe me anything.

However, patent law does work like you mention - you can have a patent on a technology, and I can have a patent on an enhancement over that basic technology. I can't create a product based on your base technology if you don't want me to, but you also can't create a product based on my enhancement if I don't want you to.

For precedent on this, see the case Anderson v. Stallone, in which Timothy Anderson sued Stallone/MGM for allegedly ripping off his fan script for Rocky 4. Courts ruled that his fan script, as a derivative work of Rocky, had no copyright protection, and so MGM was free to rip it off if they wanted to.

I happen to disagree, in that I think the law should say that derivative works are co-owned by the owners of the original work and the creator of the derivative; but that does not seem to be what the law currently says.

Unless the derivative work was created with permission.

You're right - the case I'm quoting is specifically about unauthorized derivative works, which is a pretty important distinction, especially in this context (as presumably the colorizations of Garfield were authorized)

Right, and since the online Garfields have unique colours, and future licensees can't just use them. They'd need to put in the effort to re-colourize, or pay the site for their colourized versions too.

The new copyright only applies if the derivative work was created with permission

Sure sounds like derivative works and that infamous JJ 25% different Trek & Wars.

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/04/star-trek-discoverys-vers...

Going full meta, I can easily imagine this being a Star Trek episode:

We're presented with an alternate future where Starfleet flies blocky and predominantly green ships (instead of the usual saucer + nacelles, white/gray with touches of blue, red and orange designs), and there's no Federation. In the course of the episode, the temporal agents investigating the alteration discover that the culprit is a data cache that traveled few decades into the past and landed on the lap of a particularly entrepreneurial Ferengi, who proceeded to register patents and trademarks with relevant planetary governments just as crucial technologies and iconic designs were about to be created - ensuring his own riches, at the expense of the fate of the quadrant.

I’d pay to watch Data clueless dealing with that. Brilliant!

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