---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mark Jones <markjones(a)busybusy.org> Date: Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 11:09 AM Subject: Re: [Callers] Giant dance database? To: Maia McCormick <maia.mcc(a)gmail.com> This is a GIANT project. People associated with CDSS have had thoughts of undertaking such a database. Nils Fredland had initiated a start to the idea about four or five years ago, but it is not clear if it has a prime mover right now. Copyright: In the US, "social dance steps" are not considered copyrightable, but the concept has not been tested in court. This idea that "social dance steps" are not copyrightable is a part of the legislative history of the 1980 US copyright revision, but NOT a part of the actual statute. Any dance published in the US before the copyright law change in 1980 is in the public domain absolutely, as no dance IN THE US was copyrightable, unless "an integral part of a (copyrightable) play". I predict the law will be settled after some exercise class instructor successfully (or fails to) successfully win a suit against someone for copying their "social dance steps" outside of class. It seems to me the ony population that desires to restrict the use of social dance steps instruction would be exercise instructors, and yoga instructors, and the like that have an investment in maintaining the secrecy of their choreography, since they have paying population attending for their secret "social dance steps". Copyright laws in all other countries are unique to that country, and typically much stricter and more favorable to the composer / choreographer, for social dance. Issues for the database and searching include that one must create a canonical form of all of the entered dances, since nearly every contra dance move is capable of being described in more than one way, hence a disaster for searching and parsing moves in a collective way. I can speak from experience about creating a cannonical version of a dance, as a co-collaborator of Larry Jennings's compilation, "Give and Take" [1], that it takes a lot of effort to make the dances uniform, so that they can be properly searched, and that was done for the dances collected in his book, some times to the consternation of the authors that permitted their dance to be collected and published in the book. The conclusion others have come to for such a project, in terms of cannonical searchable versions, is to have the original dance text married to a cannonical "uniformized" version that may be searchable in comparison to other dances. [1] http://www.neffa.org/give_and_take.html ~Mark Jones On Mon, Jul 28, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Maia McCormick via Callers <callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote: _______________________________________________ Callers mailing list Callers(a)lists.sharedweight.net http://lists.sharedweight.net/listinfo.cgi/callers-sharedweight.net