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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

I find disturbing the idea that a human body movement could be copyrighted.

"I own taking 13 steps, looking to the right and shrugging. If you do this in any film I want a royalty!"

Eh, it's not that far out there. Technically singing/songwriting is just human body movement, and yet that can absolutely be copyrighted.

Can it? A particular recording can be copyrighted, but as far as I know nothing prevents someone from singing it themselves and selling that.

It is not the movement that itself that is protected but the public performance. You can dance any dance you want but you can't charge people to see it if someone else opens the copyright. You also can't make a little animation of a dance that someone else created and sell it to millions of people without givinge creator royalties.

"Be careful how you dance, you could get sued"- even if it only applies to paid dance performances - sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Could make for an interesting spin for the next Dirty Dancing reboot though. All dance moves are owned by the megacorps, so the poor town can't afford a license to dance.

I completely disagree, as long as you aren't selling the original content people are free to make their own versions. This happens constantly with music and other media. Some of the most popular songs are covers of others work and not a cent of royalties is paid.

For example the Simpsons has copied scene by scene dozens of famous movies and made billions doing so.

Backpack kid didn't even "create" the dance, it's just a cheap litigious money grab.

The Simpsons are a parody, that falls under the fair use doctrine.

This is not how copyright law works. You cannot reuse other people's copyrighted performance unless your work counts as a parody and the standards for parody are well documented. For example, Weird Al Yankovich needs to get permission for most of his parody songs because most of them don't actually qualify as parody under the law. Some do, but not all. Musical covers are generally done with permission from the rights holder. https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...

Also, the question as to whether any of the songs in question meets with the minimal creativity threshold to qualify for a copyright is a different question as to whether choreography can be copyrighted. The later is definitely the case, but the former is an open question that will answered in these court cases.

Assume photogrammetry was used to reconstruct moves 1:1 from your original performance, do you still think its ok?

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