I find disturbing the idea that a human body movement could be copyrighted.

"I own taking 13 steps, looking to the right and shrugging. If you do this in any film I want a royalty!"

Eh, it's not that far out there. Technically singing/songwriting is just human body movement, and yet that can absolutely be copyrighted.

Can it? A particular recording can be copyrighted, but as far as I know nothing prevents someone from singing it themselves and selling that.

It is not the movement that itself that is protected but the public performance. You can dance any dance you want but you can't charge people to see it if someone else opens the copyright. You also can't make a little animation of a dance that someone else created and sell it to millions of people without givinge creator royalties.

I completely disagree, as long as you aren't selling the original content people are free to make their own versions. This happens constantly with music and other media. Some of the most popular songs are covers of others work and not a cent of royalties is paid.

For example the Simpsons has copied scene by scene dozens of famous movies and made billions doing so.

Backpack kid didn't even "create" the dance, it's just a cheap litigious money grab.

This is not how copyright law works. You cannot reuse other people's copyrighted performance unless your work counts as a parody and the standards for parody are well documented. For example, Weird Al Yankovich needs to get permission for most of his parody songs because most of them don't actually qualify as parody under the law. Some do, but not all. Musical covers are generally done with permission from the rights holder. https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/posting-cover-songs-on-yo...

Also, the question as to whether any of the songs in question meets with the minimal creativity threshold to qualify for a copyright is a different question as to whether choreography can be copyrighted. The later is definitely the case, but the former is an open question that will answered in these court cases.

The Simpsons are a parody, that falls under the fair use doctrine.

"Be careful how you dance, you could get sued"- even if it only applies to paid dance performances - sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Could make for an interesting spin for the next Dirty Dancing reboot though. All dance moves are owned by the megacorps, so the poor town can't afford a license to dance.

Assume photogrammetry was used to reconstruct moves 1:1 from your original performance, do you still think its ok?

> According to Ferguson’s complaint, Epic is copying videos frame-by-frame to create the dances, a case of straightforward copying. “Epic creates emotes by copying and coding dances and movements directly from popular videos, movies, and television shows without consent,” alleges the complaint. “Epic does so by coding still frames of the source material. For example, upon and information and belief, Epic coded the ‘Ride the Pony’ emote, frame-by-frame, from the ‘Gangnam Style’ dance made famous by the Korean entertainer, Psy. The Ride the Pony emote and Psy’s dance are identical in every respect.”

Does anyone know if this is the process Epic actually uses when coding the emotes?

I think it's important to note that all 3 of the major cases about this (Backpack Boy, 2 Milly, Alfonso) all are represented by the same law firm.

Epic has been putting these cheesy dances in their games since the time of Unreal. I wonder if those dances were also "stolen" (as much as a dance can be).

The idea that dance could be owned and "stolen" is farcical. Culture is not a commodity.

Intellectual property is a racket. I don’t see how it will ever get better too. Acquiring a valuable piece of IP is like finding a golden ticket.