YouTube throws shapes after copyright storm

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The choreographer behind the popular 1976 dance, the Electric Slide, has retracted takedown demands he issued to the online video-sharing portal, YouTube, following a legal challenge. True to its aim of providing viewers with a steady stream of amusing content, the site accepted a clip filmed by one Kyle Machulis at a recent software convention that showed three delegates putting on a ramshackle performance of the dance.

News of the clip soon reached originator, Richard Silver, who immediately began a campaign against what he saw as illegal use of his moves, in whatever medium they had occurred. In the case of his YouTube takedown request, he invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). ‘Any video that shows my choreography being done incorrectly [must be] removed,’ Silver said. ‘I don't want future generations having to learn it wrong and then relearn it as I am being faced with now, because of certain sites and those that have been teaching it incorrectly without my permission.’

YouTube then removed the clip, but Machulis – a software engineer with Second Life creator, Linden Lab – soon acquired legal backing from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who attacked Silver’s DMCA claim. On 22 May, Silver backed down from his position, and the dance clip has now been restored to YouTube’s line-up. EFF attorney Corynne McSherry said: ‘Mr Silver's misuse of the DMCA interfered with our client's free speech rights. New technologies have opened multiple avenues for artists and their audiences to create, share and comment on new works. We cannot let absurd copyright claims squash this extraordinary growth.’

Silver’s official website for the Electric Slide (click here to see it) shows JPG copies of registration papers for a videotape of the dance that he logged in June 2004 with the US Copyright Office of 101 Independence Avenue, Washington DC. However, this form of acknowledgement does not carry the legal weight of, for example, a trademark registered with the USPTO.

McSherry’s EFF colleague and fellow attorney, Jason Schultz, said: ‘You can copyright the choreography for dances, and then enforce the copyright against anyone who publicly performs the dance.’ But, he says, ‘someone who performs it noncommercially or adds their own artistic flair to the dance has a pretty good fair-use argument that their performance is noninfringing.’ He added that the clip showed ‘such a small piece of the video, and such a small piece of the dance’, that any full-blown lawsuit brought by Silver would have failed.

Machulis said: ‘This is a huge win for open-source licenses as well as line dance enthusiasts and hapless nerds with video cameras. It's as much a win for Creative Commons as it is for me, as this is a much more understandable platform to talk to people about intellectual property and licensing on than the usual software claims that come up.’