13 Sep
2013
13 Sep
'13
6 p.m.
On 09/13/2013 01:17 PM, Dan Pearl wrote:
Last time I checked, dance sequences were not
copyrightable.
In the United States (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, just someone who
happens to be interested in copyright law and dancing) choreographic
works have been copyrightable since 1978 (see the Federal Copyright Law
of 1976). More information here [1]. Note that you do not have to
register your work (again, in the USA, no idea elsewhere) for it to be
protected by copyright.
In every instance I have seen, publishers of dance
collections have
gone the extra step of getting permission from the dance author to
include their dance. I'm not sure any of those Creative Commons
licenses map exactly to this situation.
CC definitely applies; In §1¶f, `[the] work' specifically includes `a
choreographic work or entertainment in dumb show'. While this isn't
exactly dance, I think it gets the point across that choreography counts
as part of `the literary and/or artistic work offered under the terms of
this License including without limitation any production in the
literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or
form of its expression including digital form...'
It also defines `publicly perform' in such a way that I would assume
(again: I'm not a lawyer) would include calling a dance at a contra, and
`reproduce' to include copying a dance card.
The full legalcode (for BY-NC 3.0; not the summary I linked to before)
can be found here [2].
—Sam
[1]: http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/copyrigh.html
[2]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/legalcode
--
Sam Whited
pub 4096R/EC2C9934
https://samwhited.com/contact