Passage A:

Copyright law lets authors terminate certain grants decades after signing them. The right responds to a familiar bargaining problem: a young writer may sell rights cheaply before anyone can know that a work will endure. Termination gives the writer or the writer's heirs a second opportunity to capture value that an early contract could not reflect. Yet the statute permits a previously authorized derivative work, such as a film adapted from a novel, to continue being used after termination. Courts should read that exception narrowly. It protects investment already embodied in the existing film, but it should not permit the studio to create sequels, remakes, or expanded editions after the author's grant has ended.

A broader reading would let the exception consume the right. Popular characters and fictional worlds often carry more future value than the first adaptation. If an old license to exhibit one film also authorizes every later exploitation of its elements, the author's restored bargaining power is largely imaginary. Reliance can justify continued distribution of what was made; it cannot justify projects for which the grantee has not yet incurred production risk. The administrable line is completion: copies and ordinary technical updates of the completed derivative work remain usable, while materially new expressive production requires a new license.

Passage B:

The completion line is attractive but too rigid for works that remain economically useful only through revision. A documentary may require updated narration to correct later-discovered errors; a game may need new code and content to operate on current systems; a serialized adaptation may have been financed and designed as a unified project even though later installments were unfinished when termination occurred. Calling every post-termination contribution a new derivative work may destroy much of the investment the statutory exception was meant to preserve.

The better inquiry asks whether later changes exploit a new market or preserve the reasonable utility of the authorized derivative work. Technical migration, correction of demonstrable error, and completion of an integrated production already substantially underway should remain within the exception. A sequel aimed at a new audience or a remake replacing the original creative conception should not. This functional boundary is less mechanical than Passage A's rule, but copyright already distinguishes revisions from new works in other settings. The author receives restored control over genuinely new exploitation without acquiring a windfall from obsolescence deliberately imposed on an adaptation the author once authorized.

Both rules must also confront partial completion. Storyboards, commissioned music, and filmed scenes represent reliance, yet protecting every preparatory expenditure could revive the broad license termination removed. Passage A would protect only expression fixed in the completed work. Passage B would ask whether the unfinished material belongs to an integrated production whose preservation value can be separated from a new commercial venture. That boundary case exposes their methodological difference most sharply.