: Re: Taking copyight We were talking this with my teacher in the language class. Why if someone took a "public domain text" and published an alternate ending? Would this be legal? Clarification: In

@Annie587

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By definition, public domain works are not owned by anyone and you can use them in any way that you want. Provided, as Hszmv points out, that you do not infringe on some other work that is copyrighted, like someone else's variation on the same story. Such changes are recognized in copyright law (US copyright law anyway) as "derivative works".

So if, say, you wrote your own version of Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet" with an alternate ending where Juliet lives and marries Paris and they live happily ever after, that's perfectly legal. No one can sue you for copying Romeo and Juliet. You would then own a copyright in your alternate ending. This would not give you any rights to the original story, of course. If you copied the first 4 acts word for word but then replaced act 5 with your own ending, you would own copyright in your act 5. You would still have no rights to acts 1 through 4.

It is also perfectly legal for you to make minor changes throughout the story. If you changed a sentence here and there, you might have rights to your revised sentences, if you can reasonably claim that they are original. I mean, if you decided to recast Mercutio as a girl and so you went through and everywhere he is called "he" you change it to "she", you change "brother" to "sister", etc, I doubt that a court would consider that original enough to give you copyright in the revised text, so that you could then sue anyone else who tries to recast Mercutio as a girl. But if you made changes beyond this, if you rewrote his lines to make them "feminine" in whatever sense, a court would probably consider your new text a derivative work entitled to copyright protection.

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