I meant a LEGAL copy. I can’t / don’t encourage people to commit copyright infringement.

Now, in 2036, the copyright in SotS will expire, and then the bootleg copies out there will be fair game to copy / distribute. That’s why I suspect Disney will do a re-release in a few years to try and get one more payday before it slips away for good.

“…try finding a copy of “Song of the South” now that Disney has decreed that it be buried for reasons of political correctness.)”

To purchase, no, but copies still exist online and a bit-torrent search can find it as well.

https://movies2watch.tv/movie/watch-song-of-the-south-hd-9631

Download while you can…

Thanks for the explanation! It sounds like where there’s a will there’s a way.

[The following is not legal advice, it is commentary. If you have questions requiring legal advice, engage and consult your own attorney.]

Copyright law would not prevent the state from making copies of a work for purposes of a criminal investigation. And as the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed, Eleventh Amendment immunity means that even if the state deliberately commits copyright infringement, the copyright owner cannot recover anything from the state.

However, even where, as here, a copy of a copyrighted work has become a public record (e.g., a set of architectural plans that are filed with the city to get a building permit), state and even federal open records law don’t override the copyright act such that people can make or distribute copies of those public records. Put differently, just because a copy of a copyrighted work is a public record, that’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

What copyright law cannot do is to prevent people from *seeing* existing physical copies and reporting the facts of what is in them. (The “fair use” exception would also permit the quoting of snippets from the work, but a complete fair use analysis requires a lot more time and space than I have here.) That’s the reason for the first part of the opinion, which [mis]analyzed why there was no right of the public under state law to view the existing copies that are in the possession of the police.

If that holding is reversed (I suspect it will), then the public should be allowed to go to wherever the records are stored and view / report on them, but *not* to make copies of them. This isn’t unusual: you see this situation all the time where copies of copyrighted materials are public records. E.g., the Library of Congress (the largest library in history) has copies of an enormous quantity of works (for decades, to register a copyright in a work, you had to submit two copies: one for the copyright office, and one that went to the Library of Congress). But just as you can go to the LoC and view their deposit copy of Disney’s now-buried Song of the South, the fact that that copy is a public record doesn’t mean you have any right to make a copy of it.

Of course, if the district judge is reversed, the police could conveniently “lose” their copies of these materials, in which case there would probably be no remedy.

Do you still get to hide behind copyright law when the writings are evidence in a criminal investigation? I assume law enforcement have already viewed and documented this evidence. Doesn’t the public get to see whatever they got to see short of something like a minor’s identity? The public has a legitimate interest in this just like law enforcement did. I realize I’m going off feelz here, and fully expect to be smacked down by legal theory.

The argument is that because the shooter died intestate (without a will), all of her property (including her copyrights in her writings) will go to her next of kin under state law, and that would be the parents.

*If* there has been an administration of the shooter’s estate, and such property has been transferred to the parents, then they are within their rights to do whatever with it, including giving it to the victim’s trust. Alternatively, as it appears that the victims intervened in the estate case (to assert their claims against it), the court could approve such a transfer as partial “payment” of the claims against the estate.

From a copyright law standpoint, the copyright owner does have the right to exclude others from reproducing / distributing, so this argument isn’t completely baseless. (It’s not a new tactic — try finding a copy of “Song of the South” now that Disney has decreed that it be buried for reasons of political correctness.)