A Beginner's Guide to Choreography Copyright

Clearing Up Misconceptions About Copyright and Dance

Introduction

In recent years, numerous viral dances originating from TikTok have not received adequate attribution to the original creators of the trend. Alongside this, game companies like Epic Games, the maker of the widely popular Fortnite game, was sued on the basis of selling in-game dance emotes that mirrored popular dance trends.

In response to this, a growing awareness around attribution rights of dance creators has emerged, and a community-led self-policing etiquette on TikTok have been moderately effective at ensuring that the most viewed covers of a dance trend includes a tribute to the original creator as a "dc:@username" mention in the description or comment section of the video ("dc" is short for dance credits).

In one of the Fortnite cases, Epic Games was acquitted as the judges required the original version of the dance to by applied for copyright first, before the creator could claim infringement. In the case of Kyle Nagami, the courts found that the dance emote published on Fortnite's marketplace was considered a subsequence of a more complete choreographer that Kyle had created, which possessed sufficient choreographic and thematic intent to be considered a choreography.

The U.S. Copyright Office defines choreography as: "The composition and arrangement of a related series of dance movements and patterns organized into a coherent whole."

Modern Copyright Law

Choreography Is Surprisingly Well-Protected

What these developments brought to light was the aberrent lack of intellectual property (IP) in the dance industry. Motivated by this observation, numerous choreographers have come forward to bring light to the issue, and to resolve myths often held by the general public. What is often most surprising to both the general reader, as well as the most veteran choreographers, is that copyright for choreographic works is actually well-incapsulated and adopted in the copyright laws of most modern countries. Originating from a history of application in theatre works and classical dance, choreography copyright is historically related to these performance communities, and they are still the main group of choreography copyright proprietors.

Common Myths

The curious case is therefore why dance IP is not an ubiquitous part of the entertainment industry. Without diving into nation-specific historic trends in relation to dance IP, we focus our attention to the most recent times, and specifically how dance has evolved into a large cultural force in the digital age.

The K-pop Playbook

TikTok currently has over 2 billion global users, and dance is the second most popular form of content on the app, with over 181 billion hashtag views. Other platforms like Instagram, YouTube (Shorts) also contain a substantial amount of dance content, either in short- or long-form videos. Dance is integral to these apps, and they continue to be an important pillar in community sharing and engagement. When a dance goes viral on one app, it crosses to other apps and through reposting, quickly becomes a viral sensation. The k-pop industry has co-opted these viral dance trends and incoroporated them into a standard playbook—market a catchy snippet of the choreography, to the chorus of the k-pop song, as a dance challenge and ensure that the k-pop group posts multiple covers of this challenge with other k-pop groups, effectively cross-marketing to the fandoms with the intention to stir fans to post their own covers of the challenge. Choreographies have always been as much a part of k-pop as its music, and the performances of these choreographies on stage by the k-pop groups have led to the dominance of the global korean wave (k-wave). The dance challenge playbook has inadvertently made k-dance an integral part of the go-to-market, and thereby potential, of the k-pop music that supports it.

Regardless of the increasing importance of dance and the emergence of choreographer fandoms, one's moral rights and copyright should be safeguarded, just as it is the case in any other creative ecosystem like music, film, art, and photography.

Dance IP in Practice

Importantly, as Ali Johnson notes in his excellent review "Copyrighting TikTok Dances: Choreography in the Internet Age", the lack of adoption of copyright related processes in the dance industry is most attributable to the lack of a proper medium of fixation, in which to quantitatively asses the originality of a dance. The lack of precedents and case studies exacerbates the issue. MVNT was founded with the mission to provide the IP infrastructure for dance in the digital age. Our MVNT AI supports us in this mission to enable the large-scale indexing, management, and tracking of dance IP by fixating dance in the medium of embeddings (semanic latent spaces learned by AI models). --> give spotify discover weekly example

This allows us to not only have a quantitative estimate on the originality of any given dance, but it enables us to build the systems necessary to safegaurd choreography copyright.

Applying for Copyright on Choreographic Works

For application at the copyright office in your country one is likely to encounter a quite permissible set of requirements for the application. Fixation of the choreography is allowed in a tangible medium of expression, typically video recordings or dance notation (e.g., Labanotation), and even photographs or drawings. However, the enforcement of the copyright when granted presents as the largest bottleneck. Without any systems to manage dance IP related processes at scale, the copyright proprietor is beholden to suing the relevant party on a case-by-case basis. Whether that be the game studio who irresponsibly sells their creation as in-game emotes, or paid media performances that do not include any attribution or royalty share to the creator.

Why it matters

Of larger concern, the entertainment industry, including the dance community, has instituionalised a system of inequitable shares of the profit that comes from the choreographic works.

As the Korean Choreography Copyright Association (KCCA) moves to affect change in the common practices in the k-pop industry, MVNT is moving ahead to provide the infrastructure for what it predicts will be a big shift in the perception and mainstream adoption of choreography copyright worldwide; the increased value of the choreography lifecycle; and the expansion of the dance industry in terms of economic value and cultural impact.

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Own your movement.

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