That’s only necessary if you take it to court. You don’t have to file first to get or claim your copyright. You usually have to before you can go to court, but it’s not like you can’t protect what is yours because you didn’t file the paperwork earlier or something…
If I took a public picture of you and put it on an online platform and started making a ton of money off of it, would you sit idly by or take me to court? You’d probably take me to court, copyright be damned. This is no different.
I agree with you, I doubt this will not end well for the plaintiff, but saying the equivalent of, “don’t sue because …,” or, “you’ll never get anywhere,” is just ignoring the annoyance of what’s going on by Fortnite.
Well, the difference there would be it uses my image or likeness, which has it’s own set of rules, generally speaking. If you took a picture of my house from the street, I wouldn’t give a crap or have much in the way of standing really.
The logic here is more akin to Star Wars Kid suing Arrested Development.
I think it’s a discussion completely informed by the fact most people who don’t play Fortnite really just want to hate the game and Epic for it being so successful.
As noted above, World of Warcraft had dances a long time ago. Destiny had them before Fortnite and they were a thing in that game too.
Now that someone is making big bank on a game with dances, they’re a target.
The solution here is for Epic to settle these lawsuits by donating a ton of money to some charity in these folks’ names.
It’s different in that a picture of you uses your likeness.
If Fortnite was actually making character models that looked like Ribero, then you’d have a point. But they aren’t doing that.
It’s not about having them in the game, it’s about selling the dances… Did Destiny/WoW etc. sell them? And if the dances were’nt recognizable/outstanding/super cool whatever they would’nt sell as good as they do (that’s to be assumed); so the point here seems to be that Epic sell people stuff/dances (they do sell them separately, right?) and they are successful with that almost exclusively due to the fact that what they sell is really good creative work… however not their work, their contribution to this success is very small (those dances - as seen before - work just as well in other games… it’s not a Fortnite-character-model-thing). Hence it might seem unfair that somebody explicitly sells your idea/creative work.
Yes, because you paid money for those games.
Nobody (that’s to be assumed…) bought WoW/Destiny just because of the dance emotes… lots of people explicitly buy a certain dance move for Fortntie. Well, to me that’s exaclty the difference I explained above: a very different business model… a very different treatment of other’s creative work.
The only reason those things are in destiny or wow is because it makes them money.
I agree. But I’d argue their product would be sold otherwise. The dance emotes as a product… with them specific dances…not so much. There might be a difference in the manner of separately selling them. Not speaken from a legal standpoint here (I have no clue)… but DaveLong could’nt understand the anger… and that would be my explication: ‘shamelessly’ and separately selling other’s specific creative work.
The fact that he hasn’t bothered to enforce his “copyright” until now - despite the presence of the dance in multiple titles - should mean that he doesn’t have a case.
If he somehow wins, emotes and dances in videogames will suddenly become a lot more boring, since let’s face it - they often largely rely on memes and other items in the popular consciousness.
Here’s the rub for me: If Alfonso wins, good for him, I guess, but it really means that corporations will go nuts with copyrighting every dance move their creative folks come up with.
And to me, this is the point. We are transactionalizing everything in our culture. If you ‘create’ something, however small, you ‘deserve to get paid’ for it. Which, on the one hand I can see the point of, especially when big corporations are raking in the money. But on the other hand, it’s pretty much locking down culture into the hands of ‘owners’. It was pointed out upthread that ballet would be a totally different (and probably nonexistant) art form if this way of doing things existed back then.
In my view, we all contribute and take things from the wider culture around us. If things become a part of the larger culture, well, they no longer belong to you. What is that threshold? I have no idea. I think this because you, to get there have taken other things from this culture, and now you’re essentially paying it back. Kind of a ‘you didn’t build that’ sort of thing.
Saying that that people paid for dances because they’re in xyz games is like saying people paid Carlton to dance because they watched Fresh Prince. Sure it gave him an opportunity to dance but it wasn’t the sole reason people sat down to watch that show. It’s different. You wouldn’t be able to trace the people who watched a show or played a game JUST because of the dance. You can absolutely do that here because they paid for it.
Having said that, no I don’t think dance moves should be copyrighted to this degree. And yes, I think it’s scummy for Epic to take the work of others like this and sell it.
Well, if he says this in that interview:
“The dance is ultimately Courteney Cox in the Bruce Springsteen video ‘Dancing in the Dark;’ that’s the basis. Or in Eddie Murphy’s ‘Delirious’ video, The White Man Dance as he called it. And I said, ‘That is the corniest dance on the planet that I know of, so why don’t I do that?’”
Then isn’t he admitting he is doing someone else’s dance (Eddie Murphy)? Should Murphy get in on the action? And should Cox?
@Timex said what I need to say just fine.
The bottom line here is the dance is in multiple games and dancing is a selling point in all of these games, whether you’ve specifically paid for the dance or the entire game to acquire it. I don’t think he has a leg to stand on and again, I’m pretty sure this thread doesn’t go anywhere if it’s a game that’s not Fortnite we’re talking about here, because that’s been the case all along until Fortnite.
People want to hate Fortnite and Epic right now, and they see them making a lot of money so they want some of that money. That’s their right, but it doesn’t make them right.
Your accusation is so strangely out of the ordinary it’s weird. It also has no leg to stand on. No one is running around here saying they’re making money I hate that. That’s a ridiculous claim to make. But yeah, keep saying the same thing every 12 posts hoping it will be less wrong the first time you said it.
This sentiment is actually not uncommon right now with the “hardcore gamer” crowd hating Fortnite for its aesthetic and now it being popular with kids.