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Dance creator hits YouTube and Second Life with DMCA spamigation
Don't you dare dance the Electric Slide in Second Life or upload those videos of you breaking out a mean 'Lectric Slide in front of your webcam. Aside from making yourself look rather silly (or, in rare cases, highly co-ordinated) you'll be running afoul of copyright law and opening yourself up to some hot Digital Millenium Copyright Act action. Richard Silver, who copyrighted the dance in 2004 (he claims to have created the dance in 1976) has had enough of lame imitations of his original dance. Wikipedia reports a completely different origin for the Electric Slide but that hasn't stopped a possibly delusional Silver. He's enlisted the help of the DMCA to force Electric Slide animations to be removed from Second Life and videos of people performing the dance deleted from YouTube. CNet quotes EFF lawyer Jason Schultz, attempting to make some sense of all this, "Someone who performs [The Electric Slide] non-commercially or adds their own artistic flair to the dance has a pretty good fair-use argument that their performance is non-infringing."
I'd caution Mr. Schultz on his analysis, we once thought video and audio sampling was fair use too, but look what happened to that.
Comments
2
Subscribe to commentsDerekFeb 6th 2007 4:20PM
the guy also claims to have invented poppin and locking, break dancing, the Robot (or Robotic), and others. He seems like a jerk to me
Deeeep WitteFeb 6th 2007 4:59PM
Will the person who licensed the colour blue from God, please stand up and DCMA the sky for being an unauthorized use of your God-given colour....
Maybe the dictionairies should add DCMA as a verb for having failed to make money normally as thus resorting to d#&*-#@Gss ways to make money off a concept.