Who's been calling my dances? I want to sue...
Um, just kidding, though the discussion is interesting. And, what
happens when a dance gets written by more than one person?
I wrote a dance I called Second Third Friday, taking the idea of the
dance Third Friday by Bill Cochran. My dance goes:
A1 Neighbor Balance & Swing
A2 Men Allemande Left 1-1/2, Partner Swing (end facing across)
B1 Right & Left Through across; Women Chain to Neighbor
B2 Right Hand to Partner, Balance, (in minor set) Square Through 2,
Repeat, going on to Next Neighbor
And, I published it in my first book, /Contra Comments, /only to find
out later that Tony Parkes had written the same dance -- for the same
reason -- with the variant of a B1 Half Promenade; Women Chain. He
called his Friday Night Fever, also honoring the original Bill Cochran
dance. And his dance was composed prior to mine. Later I found the same
dance with the Right & Left Through, in another book by a Lucille (don't
recall her last name and can't find the book right now) and she called
it Balance Out #3. I know Tony and I did the same thing, because he
acknowledged the Third Friday dance in his publication.
So, it gets confusing: when does varying another dance step out of
plagiarism into an honest to goodness new dance? And, when two people
come up independently with the same sequence, do we worry that Author #1
might sue while Author #2 is free and easy?
I have no problem with people going through my books or my cards, or
asking for dances. If they want to support me they can purchase the
books I've put together for the purpose of having something to sell at
dances.
Still, I do honor the code of not putting in this forum dances others
have composed unless there's a specific reason for discussing it: the
segue from one figure to the next, or explanation of how a figure works.
Then again, when somebody writes a list of dances looking for authors,
I'm likely to copy those into my files as dances for use. And, I think,
this follows our generally accepted practice of sharing and caring.
~erik hoffman
oakland, ca
On 9/13/2013 12:45 PM, Chris Lahey wrote:
I don't know if I ever put this on my website when it was in
existence, but my plan is to publish everything as CC-SA.
I also have put a lot of thought into making a public database of
contra dances. I do agree that dances are probably not copyrightable,
but my plan was to include a field for license. I was going to put on
a bit of text on the website saying something like, "This is not legal
advice, but if something is licensed by CC-NC, you're probably safe
calling it at a paid gig, but we would ask that you not publish it in
a book that you're selling."
On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Sam Whited <s...@samwhited.com> wrote:
On 09/13/2013 03:08 PM, Jeff Kaufman wrote:
It's not clear whether an individual contra dance, as a series of
standard figures, is original enough to fall under copyright.
Thanks for the links; there's a lot of good information there.
Regardless, I'd still like to know if anyone other than Seth has any
dances licensed under a CC or similar license (even if it turns out that
none of our stuff was every copyrightable anyways).
Thanks,
Sam
--
Sam Whited
pub 4096R/EC2C9934
https://samwhited.com/contact
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