[salted-fry]

For precedent on this, see the case Anderson v. Stallone, in which Timothy Anderson sued Stallone/MGM for allegedly ripping off his fan script for Rocky 4. Courts ruled that his fan script, as a derivative work of Rocky, had no copyright protection, and so MGM was free to rip it off if they wanted to.

I happen to disagree, in that I think the law should say that derivative works are co-owned by the owners of the original work and the creator of the derivative; but that does not seem to be what the law currently says.

[jonny_eh]

Unless the derivative work was created with permission.

[salted-fry]

You're right - the case I'm quoting is specifically about unauthorized derivative works, which is a pretty important distinction, especially in this context (as presumably the colorizations of Garfield were authorized)

[jonny_eh]

Right, and since the online Garfields have unique colours, and future licensees can't just use them. They'd need to put in the effort to re-colourize, or pay the site for their colourized versions too.