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Dance Copyright Enforced by DMCA
goombah99 writes "The "creator" of the Dance move known as the electric slide has filed a DMCA based takedown notice for videos he deems to infringe and because they show "bad dancing". He is also seeking compensation from the use of the dance move at a wedding celebration shown on the Ellen Degeneres Show. Next up, the Funky Chicken, the moonwalk, and the Hustle? More seriously, does the DMCA have any limit on its scope?"
True, but apparently you can copyright choreography:
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
The summary for this story is just weird. The DMCA is just the method of enforcement, because the performance is being displayed online.
Choreography is just one of the items that are protected by copyright, which is listed in 17 USC 102:
(a) Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include the following categories:
(1) literary works;
(2) musical works, including any accompanying words;
(3) dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
(4) pantomimes and choreographic works;
(5) pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;
(6) motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
(7) sound recordings; and
(8) architectural works.
This statute was last revised in 1990. The DMCA did not add anything to it. I don't know how long choreography has been protected by copyright, but I would gamble that it's been at least fifty years or so.
This trick wouldn't work. He has no obligation or need to respond. If he owns the copyright, unless and until he issues you a license, you're out of luck.
That's supposed to sound funny, by the way...
Help I'm a rock.
I think johnny rotten owns that one. ;)
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
The "Happy Birthday to You" song, however, is still under copyright...
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
My understanding is that your DMCA takedown notice requires that you swear under penalties of purjury that you won the copyright in question.
So what's the penalty for purjury?
It's not really purjury. Since you're not required to register a work (in the US) in order to have a copyright over it, there is room for some gray area. While it's probably not going to be upheld in court, it would be difficult to prove that he's actually lying when he says he has a copyright on the dance move...he could very well believe that he does. Unless you can show that not only did somebody else do it first, but that he had some prior knowledge that it was done before him...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
If anybody is wondering, the quote unquote correct way to perform The Electric Slide is available here.
Ace
No. Copyright can be selectively enforced; no need to show due diligence. However, this copyright may be bogus for other reasons, especially considering that pre-1978 choreography copyrights are a lot more stringent, and Mr. Silver probably didn't do most of the steps needed.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
The Electric Slide is made up of 1 unit of choreagraphy known as a phrase. Mostly these "phrases" are meant to match a specific phrase structure of a particular set of music. In general a phrase is 32 beats of music. The electric slide is a 32 beat phrase with an extra 4 beat rhythm break. Through the process of doing the dance the dancer starts facing one wall. At the end of the phrase the choreagrapher incorporated a 90 degree turn. So that by the time you have completed the phrase 4 times you will end up facing the same wall that you started in. Rinse and Repeat till the song ends. It is the dancing equivalent of a for loop.
Whoever choreagraphed this little peace of nostalgic heaven did a brilliant job. The dance is so easy that any grandma can do it in only a few minutes. She feels as if she is dancing just as well as the rest of the cool and hip people on the dance floor. She is getting exorcise. The younger set gets a lot of chances to be creative within the dances structure, yet still be part of a group.
In the late 70's and mid 80's a concurrence of events in American pop-culture created an environement that made this dance popular. The late 70's marked the end of the "hustle-era" and the mid 80's marked the "urban-cowboy" era. Line dancing was not extremely popular with the hustle dancing set but was just catching on when "Disco" was collectively pronounced dead by the American zeitgest. About the same time John Travolta again made a splash with his movie Urban Cowboy and a new dancing fad was born. Two-stepping and Line-dancing at the local "honky-tonk" was all the rage. The easiest of all the dances to learn was the Electric Slide. Soon after this confluence of events every budding dance teacher across the country rushed to put out content on the new hot medium of the day... Video Tape. I still see the dance prominently displayed on DVD's in the dollar bin at Half Priced Books all the time. The Electric Slide was in the right place at the right time to become the most popular line dance in history.
In my mind there is no question that the choreagraphy is indeed something worthy of being copyrighted. On the other hand it is quite debatable whether or not it has any real value. I don't know copyright law. But I can say that if I was faced with the decision of paying a liscence fee to the choreagrapher, I will just make up my own 32 beat phrase with a 1 quarter turn at the end and call it The Erotic Bump instead. It isn't that hard to do. For an overview of where line dancing is today view this link.... http://www.ucwdc.org/competition/linedances.shtm where you will find that not one of the choreagraphers is paid for their efforts. In the meantime Im going to go out to the salsa club and do the Macarena
The difference between registered and unregistered works is that statutory damages are available for registered works without having to prove actual damages. For infringements of unregistered works you are still entitlted to damages but only in an amount that you can actually prove.
It's not that simple. His employer only owns it if he assigned it to his employer or if it is a work made for hire under the Copyright Act of 1976. Among other things, the Act requires a written agreement that the work is made for hire. The documents posted there do not include enough information to determine.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Wikipedia disagrees. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
"There is a 1935 copyright registration for "Happy Birthday to You", as a work for hire by Preston Ware Orem for the Summy Company (the publisher of "Good Morning to All"). "Good Morning to All", however, was published in 1893 and is public domain by U.S. statute. The current owner of the 1935 copyright believes that one cannot sing "Happy Birthday to You" lyrics for profit without paying royalties. Except for the splitting of the first note in the melody "Good Morning to All" to accommodate the two syllables in the word happy, melodically "Happy Birthday to You" and "Good Morning to All" are identical."
"Neither the words nor the music of "Good Morning to All" is copyrighted under U.S. federal statute."
So it seems that they won the copyright over Happy Birthday due to the similarity in the tune, yes. However, that tune has since fallen into the public domain, and it is merely the lyrics that remain protected.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Actually, I believe it was the last high hat in the sample in question... "Dum dumdumdum dudu dum dum TING" Just goes to show you he doesn't know the difference between a cymbal and a bass guitar. Go ahead, mod me offtopic. You got this far into the discussion, didn't you?
The future isn't here until I can type "car keys" into Google and have it say "You left them in your pants last night."
Nope. In Queen's song, the bass line is completely contained within the first three beats of the measure ("dum dum dum da-da dum dum" etc... It's hard to write that out without notation) whereas with Ice Ice Baby, there's an extra bass note as a pickup to the measure on the second half of the fourth beat.
I need to go to bed now as I've expended my geek quota for the day.
Actually this is a problem with the DMCA qua DMCA. Anyone can *claim* to own a copyright on any crazy thing, and send a DMCA notice, and effectively reverse the burden of proof for the price of 30 seconds typing.
The DMCA doesn't shift any burdens of proof. If a DMCA notice takes a piece of content down, the person who posted the content can counter-notify and the ISP, to retain their safe harbor, must reinstate access to the content. The entity making the DMCA notification in the first place must then file a lawsuit to continue. The counter-notification does not have to prove anything, it just has to state a belief that the DMCA notification was sent in error. At the lawsuit stage the burden of proof is still on the purported copyright holder to establish (a) a valid copyright and (b) infringement of same.
geek. lawyer.
It looks something like this. If each beat is delineated by vertical lines (for our purposes, a pipe: | ), each half-beat is a "dum" and each quarter beat is a "da", rests are dictated by underscores and in between each bar is a double |, then it would look like this:
:)
Under Pressure:
|dum dum|dum da-da|dum dum|____||dum dum|dum da-da|dum dum|____||
Ice Ice Baby:
|dum dum|dum da-da|dum dum|__dum||dum dum dum da-da|dum dum|__dum||
That's the best way I can really break it down for non-musical types.
The Automatic © era dawned in '89. That raises the question as to weather or not he initially registered. I don't know if there was a time-limit to register or something, or if a creator could indeed register a work long after the fact. I imagine his lawyer knows the answers to those questions. OTOH © is not like (TM) in that it has to be asserted to remain valid. If he does indeed hold those rights, their enforcement is largely at his discretion.