The first rule of making an argument is never to overlook the obvious. Ryan McMaken completely ignores the obvious in an article for LewRockwell.Com about the unauthorized edit of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
In case you’re out of the loop on this, someone who had access to sophisticated editing equipment re-edited The Phantom Menace to try to turn it into a movie that didn’t suck — i.e. less Jar Jar Binks, and some other tweaks. I haven’t seen it, but since the re-edit apparently just manipulated existing footage I am skeptical that even Kevin Smith (who is rumored to be the mysterious editor, though he denies it) could have salvaged it.
McMacken steps into it by writing,
In the case of The Phantom Re-Edit 1.1, the movie is not being misrepresented in any way. The “Phantom Editor” is quite clear that his (or her) version of the movie is not the original version, and that George Lucas is still the primary creator of the film. How is this any different from Andres Segovia performing variations on a theme by Mozart? The variations are not the original theme, but they can be quite pleasant to listen to, and I canÂ’t find any way that such a performance would diminish the reputation of Mozart himself.
Ummm, Ryan, since Mozart died more than 200 years ago, legally it would be impossible to harm his reputation unless someone is prepared to reanimate the dead composer. Nobody, not even Disney (yet) argues that copyrights should extend for life of a composer plus 200 years, but in fact prior to the invention of technologies to record music, composers did everything they could to control performances of their works and I’d imagine that Mozart would have been incensed at somebody cutting and pasting The Marriage of Figaro in the same way as the anonymous editor did to The Phantom Menace (it helps to remember that Mozart was a composer for hire, writing most of his famous works under contract by either publishers or opera houses, and, of course, famously died broke).