Derivative movie rotoscoping

On Nov 12, 8:45 am, halo <haloeffe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Question one is: If I take a still image, like a photograph, that
> was created by someone else, and make a tracing of it (that is, put
> tissue paper over it and make a tracing on the tissue paper of the
> photograph underneath), is the tracing I made a violation of the
> copyrights held by the owner of the photograph?

Your tracings are creating a "derivative work" based on the copyrighted original, which would be an infringement if you did not have permission from the copyright holder of the work on which it was based.

> Rotoscoping is the art of taking a motion picture and, frame by frame
> (that is image by image), creating a tracing of each frame of the
> original motion picture.  This is much like the tracing mentioned in
> the first question above, but done for every frame of the original
> motion picture.  The resulting traced images are then usually coloured
> in, and re-photographed to create a new motion picture.

That would also be a derivative work.  If the script and/or soundtrack are the same, that would be a direct copying in addition to the derivative images.  If the script is translated into a different language, that is a derivative work.

If this is not just a fun hypothetical and you are in the movie business, you DO have legal counsel on your intellectual property rights and obligations, don't you?  Please say yes.

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