Legal Question in Intellectual Property in California
I have a copyright question. If someone posted a story which is supposed to be a true story on a forum and someone else took the same story and changed a few words, cleaned up the grammar, and made it a bit more interesting who owns the copyright? We say that the original storyteller owns all rights while another says that because the original story was true and their reworded version is made up and based on the original story( by the way, it's virtually the same story with cleaned up and more detailed language) then they own the rights to the new story. We say it is plagiarized and therefore can be considered fraud as well as copyrighted infringed upon work. The creator of the second version said this
"I am not the author of the original story, I am however the author of the second version, and everyone knows it. I created this story, even though I might have borrowed from the original" "if she asked me to remove MY VERSION of what she claimed was a true account of an experience and not a story, she would have no claim, because my version is a fictional story and is my property while what she wrote was supposedly a true account of her experience. She could sue me for libel and slander, if she was claiming that what I wrote was not true and slandered her in some way but she would have a hard time proving that, since it mirrors what she, herself wrote. "
By mirror, she means the exact same story with cleaned up grammar and typos and added detail to make it more interesting. we say the original author holds the copyright and they say they hold the copyright because their story is touted as fiction while the original story was told on a forum as a true account. which is right?
1 Answer from Attorneys
First, it doesn't make much difference whether the story is true or fictional; it is the expression that is copyrighted, not the events. If every sequence of events, true or fictitious, could be copyrighted, we would soon run out of story material.
Whether the second version is a new creative work or a derivative work is probably a question of fact for the judge or jury to decide. Offhand, it sounds to me as though the fairest interpretation of the facts is that the second version is an edited derivative version of the first, and not a new creative work.
The process by which the second version was created sounds a lot like what is done by editors as major book publishing firms to go from the author's manuscript to the final print version.
Of course, to be sure the changes did not effectively produce an entirely new creative work, one would have to compare major sections of each, side by side.
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