Badly compressed still counts. I think if the data allows you to reconstruct a recognizable recreation of the original work, you have a good chance of it being

Badly compressed still counts. I think if the data allows you to reconstruct a recognizable recreation of the original work, you have a good chance of it being considered a derivative copy. A mono audio version of Star Wars, compressed down to 320x240, filmed from the back of a theater on a VHS camera, converted to Video CD, would under any reasonable interpretation be just a copy of the original. I assume it starts getting murky when there's some sort of transformation done it it. What if I run motion capture on it, and use that motion capture data to create a cartoon version of Star Paws (my puppies in space epic)? What if I do a scene for scene recreation as the animated cartoon (removing any mentions to copyrighted names -- Luke Skywalker is now Duke Dogwalker, for example)? In this case, there's been no actual data transfer -- all the sprites are hand drawn, backgrounds etc. What would be an interesting exercise would be to try and create a series of artifacts that each on their own are considered non-derivatives, but can be used together to reconstitute the original. For example, create a compression method that relies heavily on transforms / macroblocks, but strip out any of the actual pixel data from the film. That info might be supplied as palette files which are themselves not really copyrighted data, but together with the compressed transform stream can be used to recreate the original video.