Originally shared by Miguel Afonso Caetano"Now, in a somewhat stunning ruling, the court has agreed with CBS that remastered works get new copyrights as derivative works of the original. You can read the full court order here. The court, correctly, notes that for a work to get a new copyright, it must show originality beyond the initial work -- and that originality "must be more than trivial."
The court relies heavily on CBS's own experts who claim that remastering involves a lot of choices by the engineer doing the remastering, as well as an audio forensics expert who insisted that by using the remastered versions, "CBS did not use any version of the sound recordings that plaintiffs claim to own." The label that's suing, ABS Entertainment, argued that remastered music is just a digital conversion of an old analog recording. ABS supplied its own expert... who apparently was completely unconvincing, mainly because his "scientific method" of analyzing the old and new songs was basically "I listened to both carefully.""
This Is Bad: Court Says Remastered Old Songs Get A Brand New Copyright | Techdirt