Licenses VS Fair Use?
Issues regarding dance copyrights don’t come up all that often. I suspect few people even know dances can be copyrighted. C/Net News has an interesting story on a battle over The Electric Slide, a line dance once popular in dance halls and at gatherings of all types.
The story involves a creator in a long battle to preserve the form of his creation. His battle is a little unique in that it wound up with a lawsuit filed against him, which is exactly opposite of how these things usually wind up in court. At any rate, the parties reached a settled agreement, and it is that settlement that I find especially interesting here.
Part of the legal dispute was over what would be a “fair use” of the dance as meant by the copyright law. Rather than go to court and litigate, the parties made good use of their negotiations. The author, it turns out, is not particularly concerned with people posting videos of themselves doing the Electric Slide on YouTube. He IS concerned with videos that show the dance being done incorrectly. Since he doesn’t, in theory anyway, have any objection to non-commercial videos of the dance being circulated, the Electric Frontier Foundation suggested that he use a Creative Commons license to make clear that people could in fact post non-commercial videos of the dance, and he agreed.
The Creative Commons license does in fact make relatively clear what an author will and won’t allow as a use of his/her work. But I am concerned that in this case the CC license seems to have been a method of walking around the fair use provision that attaches to ALL works. Fair Use is not subsumed by the CC license. Fair Use also still exists independently of any CC license. But it is troubling that the CC license here was used as a means of clarifying a right that already existed. If our copyright law is that difficult to understand, then we are indeed heading for trouble.
copyright, dance copyright, YouTube, home videos
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