Slashdot Mirror
Can You Really Sue Fortnite For 'Stealing' Your Dance Moves? (theguardian.com)
The creator of the year's biggest game is facing a slew of lawsuits over its alleged use of famous dance moves. But will courts tap to the same tune? From a report: Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star Alfonso Ribeiro alleges that Fornite used his Carlton Dance, devised for a memorable episode of the hit US sitcom, without permission or credit. And earlier this week, Russell Horning, AKA the Backpack Kid, launched his own lawsuit claiming Epic breached copyright laws for including his signature dance move "The Floss." So while the copyright disco fills up and solicitors perform their (wallet) stretching exercises, the big question is: can you realistically copyright a dance move? The answer is yes. Kind of. It's complicated.
"A dance can be protected under copyright law in England under the protection afforded to literary, dramatic or musical works (section 3 (2) of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act)," says Alex Tutty of specialist entertainment law firm Sheridans. "But copyright can subsist in it only when it is recorded in writing or otherwise. It doesn't just exist because you did the dance; it needs to be written down or filmed" This is handy for the Fortnite complainants, because there is video evidence of all of them performing their respective moves. However, it's not quite that easy. "There are all kinds of complexities in practice," says entertainment and tech industry lawyer, Jas Purewal of Purewal & Partners. "For example, who owns the dance -- the original creator, the dancers or the choreographer? How can they prove they actually created something new? How can they show that someone else actually infringed their dance and didn't independently come up with it? The law is pretty archaic, too. It's just not been an area that has had a lot of attention."
"A dance can be protected under copyright law in England under the protection afforded to literary, dramatic or musical works (section 3 (2) of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act)," says Alex Tutty of specialist entertainment law firm Sheridans. "But copyright can subsist in it only when it is recorded in writing or otherwise. It doesn't just exist because you did the dance; it needs to be written down or filmed" This is handy for the Fortnite complainants, because there is video evidence of all of them performing their respective moves. However, it's not quite that easy. "There are all kinds of complexities in practice," says entertainment and tech industry lawyer, Jas Purewal of Purewal & Partners. "For example, who owns the dance -- the original creator, the dancers or the choreographer? How can they prove they actually created something new? How can they show that someone else actually infringed their dance and didn't independently come up with it? The law is pretty archaic, too. It's just not been an area that has had a lot of attention."
I find it highly unlikely there are any dance moves in existence that are unique, it seems like you could always find "prior form" as it were.
The Carlton Dance it turns out, was after all stolen from Courtney Cox & Eddie Murphy - and I'm sure they saw it somewhere.
P.S. If someone ends up linking to TMZ on Slashdot for relevant information, maybe that's a good indicator the story was not a good fit for the site...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it were a significant piece of choreography with a large chunk nearly directly copied, I would agree.
Fair use protects commercial intent, too. Just like a paid comedian can ape a sentence or two from any source and earn a paycheck for it, I would say a video game can "borrow" a move or two.
Eroding fair use is lethal to art works. It is already true that small budget documentarians have to bend over backwards to not accidentally have, say, Madonna music on the telly in the apartment be too noticeable, for fear of an easily won but too expensive to defend lawsuit.
Maybe you and I do not care about a big name game studio. But this cudgel will hammer the little guy a million time over, I can promise you.