Do you code? How about you send me the source to your best known, commercial product, and then I'll reformat the source, call it a derivative work, and sell it.

Do you code? How about you send me the source to your best known, commercial product, and then I'll reformat the source, call it a derivative work, and sell it. That's cool, right? Of course not I see this as being not that different. It's completely different. Look at clauses 1 & 4 of the Copyright Act as sited in the article. The spirit of this 'derivative work' concept rests on the contribution of the derivative work to the general state of the art (does it add anything?), and the effect on the existing works (does is take food out of the original artists's mouth?). Taking source code and recompiling it and redistributing it without making any contribution yourself is completely outside the idea of a derivative work. Even modifying it in some significant way, if it deprives me of my livelihood, probably doesn't work. Pixelating a Miles Davis picture is absolutely a derivative work, especially as an adjunct to an 8-bit rework of one of the man's albums. There's no substitutability at all between this pixelated version and the original picture - it would have exactly 0 (zero) effect on the demand or availability of the original photo of Davis. To me, simply taking a picture someone else took, and digitizing or pixellating it, is not something that I would consider "derivative". I liken it to sampling music to be used in a "derivative" work. In the vast majority of those cases, the samples have to pass through the proper licensing and be released for use before they are resold. Yes - and I'm against requiring licensing for music resampling as well. The test should be substitutability and contribution, not establishing arbitrary control over the way intellectual property is allowed to evolve and who is allowed to reshape it.