[Callers] Choreography and Copyright

[Winston, Alan P. via Callers]

On 1/22/2016 7:02 PM, Martha Wild via Callers wrote:
> Call a dance written by someone else:
> Pretty much always, is my guess. If I note down a dance at a festival and I like it, I call it, and try to get all attributions for announcement. Maybe if there was a caller who stipulate that no one was to call their dances without express permission or proof they’d bought the book - but I don’t know of a caller doing that.
Agreed!

> Publish a dance written by someone else:
> If the dance is on the author's open website, or I know the caller personally and know they are happy to have their dances spread throughout the community, then fine. If a dance is in a book that one has to buy, then never - might mention the name and author, and maybe the book, but I wouldn’t give out the dance details. Don’t know? Don’t publish it.
I assume you're using "publish" to mean "disseminate" - give out the 
instructions on mailing lists, let people see your card, whatever.
If so, agreed!  To be excessively anal about it, I would disagree if 
"publish" meant "include in a collection I was putting out to sell" 
(without getting express permission from the author.)


> Modify, borrow from, a dance written by someone else?
> Always! If it’s a small change and I’m calling it I just give the author credit and say it’s a slight variant (forward and back instead of circle left for example). Using an interesting figure and sticking it in a new context substantially different from the original - no problem, but I might credit the original on a website for example - “inspired by Title, by So-and-So”.
Agreed.  And sometimes the name of the new dance can have a nod to the 
name of the old dance.

> Very different from English Country, by the way. If someone has written a dance there, and you realize that a turn single left would be so much more intuitive and flow better than a turn single right, heaven forfend that you should suggest changing the author’s original intention! Even if maybe it was an oversight originally! Liberty is NOT to be taken, at least with modern dances - though it’s a little grayer with traditional dances that various people interpret differently because the original directions are sometimes obscure.

Not *always*.   I have seen respected ECD leaders call things 
differently than they were written, although they usually call attention 
to it when doing it.  I have also had someone ask me if a particular 
modification of a dance I'd written - a right-hand turn instead of a 
g-word  - was acceptable to me, and I said "sure", and wasn't honked 
that he called it that way.  I was pleased when he put it on the program 
of a ball he was calling, and then honked when the ball booklet had the 
modified version and listed the dance as a collaboration between the two 
of us.


>
> As for me - as a dance choreographer - please feel free to spread my dances - they are on my website, and I wrote them to go out into the world and be fruitful and multiply and all that.
Thanks for that!  I've called some of them and been happy to have them.

-- Alan