Copyright infringements...

[Jedi Master Kyle]

Branching off from the debate sparked by Geki, if taking someone else's work and redoing it, and thus creating your own "better" version is bad and wrong, how do you all feel about bands/musicians that cover older songs? Are they taking an old song and making it better, which we deemed to be bad, or are they paying hommage to the original artist? And in either case, how could we apply those arguments to the TPM edit?

[Jedieb]

I think cover songs can be all right. I've found that it often depends upon how you feel about the original. If it's a song that you're familiar with but you don't have a strong attachment to then you're probably more open to enjoying it. I can think of cover songs by Cheap Trick (Don't Be Cruel), Phil Collins (Groovy Kind of Love), Van Halen (Won't Be Fooled Again) that I enjoyed. But a few years ago Mariah Carey covered Open Arms by Journey and I didn't want ANY part of it. I don't think I've ever even heard the song all the way through.

Holy crap, I'm really exposing myself as a child of the 80's. :0

I think cover songs and the reedits aren't a good comparison because cover songs are done with the permission of the original artist. At the very least the artists covering the song have to pay someone a fee to use that song. The reedits weren't made with GL's consent. I've said before that I don't mind them as long as the editors don't try to profit from them. But they do NOT have the right to market or profit their reedits.

[Doc Milo]

Jedieb is right on the cover songs: If a song is really old and redone, that song might be in "public domain" and be open for anyone to redo. If it is more current, then the artist redoing the song has to get permission of the original artist -- or whoever owns the copyright, which is not always the original artist.

There are some people that write songs for a living, and sell them to artists. Depending on the rights that they sold to the artist, that songwriter can sell his song to another artist as well. If the songwriter sells the entire copyright to the artist, then whoever wants to redo the song has to get permission -- and usually pay a subsidy or fee -- to the original artist.

That is a completely different thing than is being done with the re-edits.

I do disagree with Jedieb on the point about not minding the re-edits as long as the re-editors don't profit off of them. Marketing or distributing someone elses work, even if you don't earn any money and give out the re-edits for free is still infringement on copyright.

I liken it to the entire Napster thing, where people "trade" their music over the Napster website. They are essentially distributing someone elses property without the original artist being compensated for it. Sure, such things have been known to help the unknown artist, but it is still wrong and copyright infringement to do such a thing without the original artist's permission -- and it would be even more wrong if that person distributed a remix of a song as well.

I wouldn't want anything I wrote (and published) to be typed or scanned into a computer and traded online. That would be ripping me off of potential profits from potential customers, regardless of whether or not the person distributing my work is making a profit off of his distribution -- and if that person changed something they didn't like in my novel, then distributed it . . . that's not only ripping off my work, but placing my work in competition against an unsanctioned copy of my work. It doesn't matter how much I already have (or how much Lucas has.) Wrong is wrong. The law applies equally throughout, or it isn't worth the paper it's written on.

[Jedieb]

Well I knew this would happen eventually. Anyone who collects SW toys knows of the unscrupulous nature of scalpers and horders and the world of ebay. The Phantom Edit has now made its way to ebay:

cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayI...1440671812 (http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1440671812)

Right now this copy is going for $56 with 2 days left in the auction. $56!!!! I'd bet $100 that this is some classic "vanhead" who got his hands on a copy at Mann's or who knows where and now wants to cash in on the hype. It's kind of sad that something that started out as a fan project has turned into this but it was kind of inevitable. The reedit will be out there for good now. I've even read about copies making their way to AUSTRAILIA!

This has obviously gotten out of the original reeditors hands. Maybe this is what they intended, maybe it isn't. One guy working on a editng machine and distributing copies to his friends is one thing, selling on ebay is quite another. But in today's world of the internet can one thing happen without the other taking place? It looks like it can't.

[Jedi Master Kyle]

Maybe he should have done the re edit on beta. No one uses that!

But it's for sure that anything that gets an ounce of recognition these days will wind up on the net. If this guy were re editing for fun, or even for educational purposes (hey it could be a possibility - I used stuff done by others when in graphic design school, and maybe this guy is in film production and is learning editing). Anyway, if it were either of those purposes, I could live with it. But if this guy did it because he thought TPM sucked, and he wants to play god, then he deserves to be penalized. In any event, it's gone too far now, and a new bootleg is added to the star wars universe.