> A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick".

Interestingly, this isn't quite true. People are trying to exert copyright over the specific motions under choreography protection.

I wonder how this would go down in a court of law, in that the specific motions they are claiming copyright on were /obfuscated/ or downright /concealed/ from view. I wonder if you can legally be considered to have copied something you have not seen..

I suppose what you'd end up copyrighting is the final effect, not how it's achieved. Which is, I guess, the point.

Without knowledge of the finer points of copyright law (IANAL), is this (the final effect) even copyrightable?

My understanding is that tricks aren't copywritable, but performances are. So magicians have sometimes successfully sued each-other over copying not just a trick but their delivery of said trick. That was the justification for the Penn and Teller lawsuit mentioned in the article

But I think the issue with the site discussed in the article is mainly just copyrighted material:, books, videos and the like.

Magic tricks can be patented.

https://www.google.com/patents/US6623366

And of course they can be trade secreted. Can they be copyrighted? That I dunno. A performance can be copyrighted. But the ideas? Probably not.

[conplete speculation, by me] They may be using the copyright of things they don't care about to shutdown the site to eliminate the things they do care about which they have no legal means to eliminate directly.