Talk:Road to Bali

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Film: American

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Ancillary rights

I'm not intimately familiar with all aspects of copyright law and practice, so I don't have a great sense of exactly what "ancillary rights" could or could not include, but it appears to me, from reading the article on the previous "Road to..." film, that ancillary rights include rights to copy, distribute, or perform a work in a particular medium or setting, such as television or home video. It appears for this article that the ancillary rights in question are rights to make home video releases of the film. The question I have is, if the film is in the public domain, i.e. not under copyright, can there still be any ancillary rights? I would think that those rights would be "ancillary" to the main copyright, and so without a copyright on a film no one can have ancillary rights relating to it. An analogy to explain my logic is that if no one owns a particular tract of land, then no one can be granted rights of use on that land, such as rights of way, easements, or mining rights. Is this correct, or are there some lesser rights that can be had over a motion picture (or an audio recording, or a work in text) even if the overall "ownership" of the work vis-a-vis copyright is not established, or is established to be general (communal) and not particular to any legal person? If ancillary rights cannot exist apart from an active copyright, then their mention in this article is nonsensical and should be removed. If they are somehow conditional or even if they are strongly binding despite the film being in the public domain, then this should be clarified, as most people seeing the film described as being in the public domain would think that means they can legally copy it, distribute it, show it for a fee, use clips of it within their own works, etc., however they choose, without relying on "fair use" principles. 71.242.7.208 (talk) 02:23, 7 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]