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Well, it works along the same lines as music. While the song itself may be public domain, individual performances of it can be copyrighted. In some cases blanket copyrights can be applied to works by a given group or company. IE, if they produce something, it's automatically covered under copyright, so anything derived from that performance is protected by the copyright, which then requires permission to be granted in order to use it. Yeah, our copyright system is royally boned, but nobody seems interested in fixing it since the current system allows people to bone one another and make insane amounts of cash in the process. It also favors those with the most money. Now if you were to make it prohibitively expensive to maintain the current system, especially by those in the upper level, things would change nearly overnight. But alas, there's nothing out there anymore, save for a total reset of the system (which will happen when hell freezes over), that will fix these issues. So yeah, we're stuck with retarded stuff like this.
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