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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?"
1) The DMCA is not an organization, it is a law. Laws get enforced. They don't go around doing the enforcing.
2) The claim has yet to be upheld (enforced) by any court or other governmental body.
3) Even if the letter is acted upon and the video is removed, that still doesn't indicate whether or not the DMCA is being properly applied (if not, then the DMCA can't be demonized in this situation). All it means is that someone decided removing the video was the easiest way to handle a potential problem.
When YouTube/Google turn on their revenue sharing plan for video makers, this is going to get ugly. One of the tenets for "fair use" is whether or not the use of the copyrighted material was whether the intent was of a commercial nature or not. Once revenue sharing starts, millions of legally "naive" video uploaders are suddenly going to find themselves thrown into the nasty side of the fair use litmus test. Watch how the DMCA takedowns and litigation filings skyrocket once money is involved (as it always does).
Robert Oschler - RobotsRule.com
Seriously, is it that hard to understand that ITS is the possessive, and that IT'S is a contraction for IT IS???
The more the law is used like this, the more it will be seen as absurd. When the DMCA is used to stomp on uses of technology the wider public can't understand it. When it's used to stop you from being filmed dancing a certain way in public it's understandable by everyone.
If people are not doing the correct steps, they are not violating his copyright. He may have a trademark case, since the owner of a trademark can compel people not to use his trademark incorrectly, but if his complaint is inaccuracy he has no copyright case.
We can submit his site as a violation of copyright. Unless he can prove that he's got the rights to use Spiderman's image.....and is that Voltron, too? I'm not sure who the other two are supposed to be.
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http://the-electricslidedance.com/sitebuildercont
Layne
The ultimate irony would be if the videographer claimed copyright, the way so many wedding photographers do, and went after him for having a copy of the video. I haven't heard much about it lately, but apparently it is *really* difficult to find a wedding photographer who will simply take his fee and turn over the digital files and/or negatives. I once scanned my parent's wedding photo, and it occured to me that if I were to actually try and legally comply with copyright, I would have to locate the photographer in another state. He took the picture 50 years ago. He's probably dead. I'd have to find his heirs. Needless to say, I "pirated" my parent's wedding picture. Come and get me!
Now, I'm not war3z kiddie. I'm actually in favor of intellectual property as a concept (legal mumbo-jumbo about it not being property? feh!). Howeve, when it fails the "common sense" test in such an obvious way, you have to employ something called "judgement". Hopefully, that's what the judge will do, and pencil whip this silliness right ouf of court.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So, if they aren't doing the Electric Slide correctly, maybe they aren't violating his rights. Maybe they are doing some *OTHER* dance that isn't copyrighted......and doing it right.
So there.
Layne
Has he enforced his copyright before? I'm doubting it. Don't people have to show proof that they've done their best making sure noone violates their copyright in order to be able to keep it?
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
The irony of course is that copyright, a mechanism intended to create a market for creative and intellectual works, effectively discourages participation in that market. The alternative of noncommercial fair use only underlines that failure. (Eliminating fair use wouldn't help: in that case, most of these works wouldn't be created and/or distributed.)
Not that this is new, it's just really obvious here. In spite of the ideology of copyright fundamentalists who preach "the more the better", economists know that copyright by its nature must introduce inefficiencies into the market.
"The problem is that you can copyright a dance (any damned dance) in the first place. I'm going to go copyright 20 different punches, kicks and acrobatic moves then get paid by every single kung-fu movie producer in the world."
No. You can't copyright something, magically, that you didn't come up with. You can't copyright a punch or kick that someone else has already used. You could perhaps copyright a sequence of 20 different punches, kicks and acrobatic moves as you seem to suggest, but unless your sequence takes on another layer of signification in the popular consciousness, no kung-fu movie producer will use it. This is perfectly reasonable. The Electric Slide is desirable to people because of the value it as a whole has gained historically, not because it's a fundamentally basic mode of movement.
Yes, you can copyright a dance, as with any other mode of expression.
Seriously: there are problems with this guy's strategy, including uncertainties of the copyright, whether it's applicable at all, whether fair use comes into it, and of course the onerous requirements of the DMCA. But people's ability to claim a copyright on their own creative work is not the problem here. His being a bully is.
Or, if you're an optimist, that the absurdly strong powers of copyright holders to "protect" their works ended up causing the public to abandon them.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
OTOH, the damages he might conceivably collect will be less than if he had been actively asserting his rights all this time. "Innocent" infringement incurs only actual damages, while "willful" infringement opens one up to serious punitive damages.
I'd be curious to see where the lines are drawn for derivative works WRT choreography. Typically dance IP issues only arise with more "serious" forms like ballet, musicals, dance companies, and the like (to the point where some instructors insist on controlling taping of student recitals so that students & family can get copies, but rivals cannot). I don't know how derivation would apply in a "popular" or "modern-folk" dance idiom which, almost by definition, will gradually change over time.
Any choreographers (or their lawyers) want to chime in on this one?