Category: Copyright

#TarHeelToneUp

Are you dancing today for #TarHeelToneUp for the #TarGramChallenge?

Once you start getting into copyright law, you realize that copyright law is everywhere. We have even seen it in dance. Anne Gilliland dances English Country Dances, and when I was younger, I took ballroom and swing dancing classes at my alma mater. We often don’t think of dance as involving copyright.  Today is Tar Heel tone Up, and maybe you’re doing “Cardio Funk,” “Zumba,” Z2” or “Ballet Sculpt.” Maybe you’re going to go to a dance night or dance around in your room. Did you know that dance may have a copyright interest like your novel or song? The dance moves may have a copyright interest as you’re stretching out or toning up.

To qualify for copyright protection you have to “fix the work in a tangible form of expression.” More simply put, according to the Copyright Office, your choreography, “. . . can be embodied in a film or video recording or be precisely described on a phonorecord, in written text, or in a dance notation system such as Labanotation, Sutton Movement Shorthand, or Benesh Notation.” The Dance Heritage Coalition has even produced a “Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use of Dance-Related Materials” if you want to review some information before coming and talking to us in the Scholarly Communications Office.

Check out the fitness classes over at the rec and dance away. If you’re developing your own dance class, dance, or want to perform someone else’s dance, come over to the Scholarly Communications Office and talk to us! We can’t advise you on the dance, and we might be able to dance poorly, but we can definitely advise you on how to protect your work or give it away for free.

Chance and the Macaque

Point/Counterpoint:  an occasional feature where Anne and Brett offer two different takes on an intellectual property issue or idea. 

Monkey Selfie

 

Comments on the macaque that took pictures have been everywhere.  They include:

Animals have no personhood and can’t own copyrights.

  • It was a picture taken by chance, and so the photographer can’t own the copyright.
  • The photographer says that the macaque acted as his assistant.
  • Does Indonesian law govern?  Does the copyright law of the photographer’s home country govern?
  • The Copyright Office postulates that animals can’t own copyrights.  Neither can spirit guides or deities.  Good to know.

The New Yorker has a good analysis.

But the whole story has brought up a couple of related thoughts for me.  The first is about chance in art, the capturing of chance and randomness in art, and the ability to copyright what results.  Most think—and I do too—that it’s about intent.  Silence is merely silence that isn’t and can’t be copyrighted until John Cage comes along. In those situations, it’s useful to think about what William Patry calls the continuum of idea/expression rather than the idea/expression dichotomy

I am aware of the role of chance in my own work, and that of many other artists.  The paint makes contact with the wet watercolor in a way that I can predict but that is not completely under my control.  I work with the result and create with intentionality, but some part of the resulting painting came about by chance.  That role of chance is often less easy to point to in written works, but there are some writers and poets who work with words generated randomly.  Perhaps the copyright is thinnest as intentionality lessens.  At the same time, part of creation is seizing and recognizing felicitous, unintended results.   It is a conundrum where lack of intentionality becomes intentionality.

I also began thinking about two articles I had read recently in the New York Times.  One was about animal law, and the efforts of the Nonhuman Rights Project to convince courts to extend legal rights to primates.   The other was on ideas about the thoughts and emotions of animals.  Will we someday grant legal rights to animals?  Could an animal understand the incentive of copyright and use it to create?  It seems unlikely now, but I do wonder if it will be possible in the future.