The Electric Slide Inventor Strikes Back

From CNET News

The inventor of the "Electric Slide," an iconic dance created in 1976, is fighting back against what he believes are copyright violations and, more important, examples of bad dancing.

Kyle Machulis, an engineer at San Francisco's Linden Lab, said he received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice about a video he had shot at a recent convention showing three people doing the Electric Slide.

"The creator of the Electric Slide claims to hold a copyright on the dance and is DMCAing every single video on YouTube" that references the dance, Machulis said. He's also sent licensing demands to The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Machulis added.

Indeed, Richard Silver, who filed the copyright for the Electric Slide in 2004, said on one of his Web pages that the DeGeneres Show had been putting up a legal fight as he tried to get compensation for a segment that aired in February 2006 in which actress Teri Hatcher and other dancers performed the popular wedding shuffle.

The 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act governs copyright infringement as well as technology whose purpose is to circumvent measures intended to protect copyrights. Under the DMCA, rights-holders can complain to services like YouTube that content uploaded by users infringes their copyrights.

Silver did not respond to an e-mail sent Friday asking for comment and did not answer several phone calls to his Groton, Conn., home. A representative for the DeGeneres Show declined to comment.

But on the YouTube page Silver himself posted showing the Electric Slide, he wrote, "Any video that shows my choreography being done incorrectly is being removed. 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 (people) that have been teaching it incorrectly and without my permission. That's the reason I (copyrighted) it in the first place."

YouTube has been dealing with a slew of DMCA takedown claims recently. Viacom on Friday demanded the service remove a hundred thousand videos it claimed infringed its copyrights.

Some may find it odd that a dance could be copyrightable, of course. But according to Jason Schultz, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dance moves can definitely be protected under copyright law.

"You can copyright the choreography for dances," said Schultz, "and then enforce the copyright against anyone who publicly performs the dance."

Does that mean that everyone who giggles their way through the Electric Slide with the wedding videographer shooting away is violating copyright? No, but the videographer could be at risk. But Schultz said he believes Silver's claims against Machulis and others who have posted videos on YouTube may be questionable.

"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," Schultz said.

Because there are only about 20 seconds of actual footage of people doing the Electric Slide out of Machulis' nearly five-minute video, Silver's claim may be on shaky ground, Schultz said.

"Here, it's such a small piece of the video, and such a small piece of the dance (that) I think if (Silver brought) a copyright lawsuit, he would lose," he said.

UPDATE: Wow. Just a few hours after I posted this story, I was contacted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF web site).

Apparently, I'm a little behind... The case is already over...

'Electric Slide' Creator Calls Off Online Takedown Campaign