Nobody doubts you filed papers. I simply question whether you really understood what you did when you licensed the work creative commons.

Ric

During any part of the proceedings did anyone do ANY basic checks on the dance itself. By this I am referring to Ric Silver’s INSISTANCE that the dance was ‘invented’[Ric Silver's original word] to the music of ‘Electric Boogie’ by Marcia Griffiths AND this was done in the year 1976.
Simply, if one have done a very basic check they would have found that the song was FIRST recorded in the winter of 1983. And if they had delved a little deeper they would have also thrown a VERY large cloud on Mr. Silver’s insistance that Bob Marley was also on the recording. There are many other anomalies and contradictions within Rick Silver’s version of ‘event’s that for the most Junior of Schoolchildren to say…’Hang on.. how can this guy says he choreographed a dance some 13 years or 6 years (if he managed to get hold of a UK/Jamaican copy) prior to the release of the music….. ‘.
The answer is quite simple… he didn’t and thats if he EVER Choreographed the dance in the first place. If he lied about the music…

Did ANYONE read the discussion on Wikipedia site (The Electric Slide) and IF they did did they notice the mega number of times Ric Silver altered his story to suit.

Going off the result of the findings – obviously not.. and THAT sickens me.

I work in intellectual property (IP) myself, and have seen countless people make ignorant claims that they owned something that U.S. law clearly says they can’t. With patents especially, 99% of the community consists of earnest and sane people, leaving us with 1% who are total crackpots.

There’s just no point trying to disabuse everybody who has some zany theory of IP law. There are more of them than us (by far), and they’re mostly harmless anyway, because no court takes them seriously.

For patents, the great majority are never litigated. The inventor buys a coffee mug with the first page of the patent printed on it and that’s as far as it goes. So to strike down every invalid patent is a waste of time—ya just go after the ones that are litigated and creating a problem. Similarly, if Mr. Silver puts a CC license on the electric slide and the King James Bible, there’s no point caring unless he asserts them in an aggressive way, and we’ll have to take Mr. Schultz’s judgment that he won’t.

As for other copyright claims on dance moves, they’re just as invalid as they were last month.

At the top of every Creative Commons license is the following:

“THE WORK (AS DEFINED BELOW) IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS CREATIVE COMMONS PUBLIC LICENSE (”CCPL” OR “LICENSE”). THE WORK IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OR OTHER APPLICABLE LAW.”

*IS* protected. Not “may be” protected. But “is”. As far as I know, something that is protected by copyright or other applicable law cannot, in fact, be in the public domain, as public domain works are not “protected”. If, as a statutory requirement of Creative Commons, a work must be “protected” by copyright or other applicable law, then it cannot be in the public domain.

By accepting that this work may hold such a license, the EFF also must accept, then, that the work cannot be in the public domain as it must be protected. I think the crux of this issue is that social dance steps cannot be protected, and as such, are in the public domain. If they are in fact in the public domain, they should not be able to have a CC-license attached.

If the EFF accepts that a work may be CC-licensed, then by the statutory requirements of the CC license, the EFF is also accepting that social dance steps are licensable, and as such, cannot be in the public domain, which, I agree, opens up a whole new can of worms.