I know what we learned. Absolutely nothing. But that’s because we read the Terms of Service wherever we have content, even simple promotional content. It’s why, prior to the change, that we had still photos on our Facebook page, but no video. We may be bringing the dance world full on into the digital age, but that doesn’t mean we are anything but conservative when it comes to our distribution. We don’t worry about this blog being repurposed, because half the time, we’re writing about something wonderful that we’re doing, and we’re more than happy to have that information spread far and wide.

Sure, we were surprised by Facebook’s sheer unbridled stupidity aggressiveness when they revised the TOS, but we weren’t vulnerable. Frankly, we were also a bit surprised at some of the reactions of the general blog community, as we read many postings on the issue that were extremely angry about terms that hadn’t even changed! We weren’t surprised at how quickly Facebook reverted back to the old policy, since they were pretty fast to adapt to user outrage after the whole Beacon fiasco.

A few weeks ago, I spoke on a panel at the Dance on Camera Festival about new digital opportunities for screendance filmmakers. Over the course of the panel, the discussion shifted to the Creative Commons license. I am sure there are many of you that post video your dance work onto web sites under these terms.

Here’s the thing: we don’t. When we post anything on other social networks that use the Creative Commons license, we add additional disclaimer text. Although we believe Creative Commons can be effective  when being used to protect copyrightable material where there is a long history of case law, such as literature or even film, choreography is a different animal all together. There are a handful of court cases where judges have had to decide on matters related to choreographic copyright. In these cases, the judges have tended to shrug their shoulders, and push the more detail heavy parts of the ruling on to future judges deciding future cases.

Questions:

1.) If you post a film of a dance performance onto a site under the Creative Commons license, what protections do you have if someone were to reproduce the choreography on a live stage?

2.) What would be the impact of having that material available to users internationally, and how would the license impact those uses?

3.) What recourse do you have to remove your content previously granted under the Creative Commons license if the legal standards for protecting choreographic copyright were to change?

Have fun!

Tagged with: choreography , Copyright and Intellectual Property , creative commons , facebook , TenduTV , terms of service , tos