Ok , Ill try to understand the Lucas doesnt own the rights argument.
Are you against all changes done since the release? Should a filmmaker be able to clean up his film before a rerelease? Can he or she delete misstakes like microphones showing? If yes, who decides which ones?
There were different cinema versions with different sounds when Star Wars was first released. Would they all be considered property of the public?
Basically what I ask is who, if not Lucas, decides on changes in his films?
Well, that's the tricky part, innit?
I'm not sure there's an easy answer to your questions, either. This is also where the philosophical/ethical side of things breaks down, and you have to start getting down to practical decisionmaking, usually with the law getting involved somehow to determine who has final rights.
In American copyright law, if memory serves, a true collaborative work where both authors are treated as equal copyright holders gives both authors the FULL rights to the material to do with as they please. In other words, if we write a book together and are truly co-owners of the copyright, you have the right to license the reproduction of that work, as do I. Neither one of us trumps the other. With a work for hire, legally speaking, the person doing the hiring (IE: Lucas) gets the rights and the person who's been hired (IE: Williams or McQuarrie) owns nothing, regardless of the actual creative contribution by the person doing the hiring.
Wanna know why Todd McFarlane can make a bunch of toys of Spawn characters, but never makes toys for his version of Spider-Man? Right. Because Marvel owns Spider-Man, and owns all the work McFarlane did during his run on Spider-Man. Doesn't matter how little the corporate investors had to do with his designs, the storylines, etc. The corporation owns the rights to all of that (legally).
My point about the ethics being tricky gets to the underlying argument about who the author is. For ethical purposes, I think a true collaborative effort is indistinguishable from a "work for hire" arrangement, regardless of whether there's an employment/independent contractor relationship between the parties. Both people -- the employer and the employee -- are (potentially, anyway) authors of the work.
So who has the rights to muck with it? I dunno, honestly. It's a tough question. You could argue that they all have equal rights, which would mean that (ethically) McQuarrie could rerelease his own version of Star Wars, as could Williams, as could Lucas, as could any number of people. Or you could say "that's really stupid" and argue that only one of them should be able to do it -- the person who made it all possible or perhaps the "vision behind the vision," namely Lucas himself.
I also think, however, that it's not so easy as, for example, 2011 Lucas would have us believe, were he to argue that "The artist" has the sole right. Oh really? Well, which artist? When you're dealing with a film or some other collaborative work, which artist's rights trump the other artists involved in the project? Or does everyone have equal rights?
Or maybe the artist ISN'T paramount. Maybe the artist is just one part of the equation, and the audience's experience comes into play as well. After all, isn't art a shared experience between artist and audience? Doesn't the audience's interpretation and experience help MAKE the art and give it meaning? These aren't easy questions, certainly not at a philosophical level, so glib answers like "They're MY stories" don't (for me, anyway) resolve the issue at least on an ethical/moral level.
Maybe a better way to think about it is that the artist is the best guardian of the shared experience between artist and audience, but as such has a duty to respect the experience of the audience itself -- that experience being essential to the nature of art. When you have multiple artists involved, perhaps those multiple artists should equally respect each others' collaborative efforts and not really muck about with their collective work without some form of internal agreement amongst themselves.
So, if you've got a 35mm sound edit, a 70mm sound edit, a 16mm sound edit, etc., those might be fine, assuming that the collective group of artists who made the film have signed off on it.
Another way to think about it is a question on when a change fundamentally alters the underlying nature of the work or the "meaning" of the work. This is where, for example, a digital erasing of a boom mic shadow wouldn't be objectionable, but Greedo shooting first would be. That, of course, opens PLENTY of additional changes to debate in a grey area (IE: are Vader's new "NOOOOOOOO"s a change to the underlying "meaning" of the work? How about putting rocks in front of R2? What about the continual messing with Obi-Wan's dragon scream?), but it at least provides some sense of guidance.
Anyway, like I said, these aren't easy issues. It's never easy when you start getting into these kinds of ethical debates on something as subjective and complicated as art. I guess my own view is that sort of hybrid of "artist as caretaker for the public." Which I suppose is why I have the attitude of "I don't care what changes he makes, as long as he releases some kind of largely untouched archival version that at least is high enough resolution to not look pixelated or blurry on an HDTV."
