2.3: Copyright: Infringement and Permitted Acts

In the third section of this part you will be invited to think about infringement of copyright and then about some of the permitted acts which allow parts of copyright protected works to be taken without permission.

The objective is that by the end of this section you will have a greater understanding of the scope of the exclusive rights that belong to you as the copyright owner in the dance, and the limitations on their scope.

Conversely, you will understand what you can do with copyright works belonging to others without their permission (fair dealing).

The two way process

When thinking about the exceptions and limitations to copyright, do remember that this is a two way process: subject to these limits other people can take elements from the work that you make without payment or permission.

Equally, subject to these limitations, you can take parts from copyright protected works belonging to others without payment or permission.

To start this section, read the following paper where you will see that there are a number of questions embedded in the text:

These questions include:

What would amount to copying of a substantial part of a dance and thus infringement if done without authorisation?”

What would amount to copying of a substantial part of a dance and thus infringement if done without authorisation?”

Consider the following video was devised and performed by Caroline Bowditch and Fiona Wright with the video produced by Becky Evans.

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If no permission was given to upload this video to YouTube, what and whose exclusive rights would have been infringed?

Exceptions and Limitations

To start this section, read the following paper where you will see that there are a number of questions embedded in the text:

“Think of your own practice and when, during the process of creating a new work, you have borrowed from elsewhere. Could fair dealing for the purposes of non-commercial research be relevant to that borrowing? What are the limitations?”

A close reading of the paper should enable you to come to a view on them. You will then be better equipped to think about the exceptions and limitations in relation to your own practice.

Fake It!

Think of the work ‘Fake It!’ devised and directed by Janez Jansa in 2007, of which an excerpt is available via the link below:

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Ramsay Burt, in his book, Ungoverning Dance, talks about this piece (2017: 76).

a group of Slovenian dancers under the direction of Janez Jansa restaged excerpts of canonical works from recent dance history for a particular event, the 2007 Exodus Festival in Ljubljana. Its starting point was the desire to make a performative response to the fact that the government, at that time formed by the Slovene Democratic Party, had cut financial support for the Exodus Festival so that it was no longer in a position to program the kinds of international artists that it had for so many years presented alongside Slovenian artists.

“The group of dancers working with Jansa drew up a list of artists whom, had money been no problem, they would have liked to program in the festival; they identified Pina Bausch, Trisha Brown, William Forsythe and Steve Paxton, and Sankai Juku because it was a key company with which Tatsumi Hijikata had been associated. 

“These artists or their administrators were then contacted with invitations to perform in Exodus and asked what fee they would charge.  Because the invitations were extended so late, none of the artists were able to accept, though some fondly recalled previous visits to Ljubljana.  During Fake It! The email correspondence was projected on a screen, together with contextual information about the works as well as statistics about the dance scene in Slovenia.  Meanwhile the dancers performed their own ‘fake’ versions to an audience seated in the round …

“‘Fake It!’ was performed in the name of the Slovenian prime minister in such a way as to trouble and undermine the processes of national identity formation on which the government’s nationalistic policies depended’.”

Burt, R. (2017) Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Dance Theatre and the Commons.  Oxford: Oxford University Press

If ‘Fake It!’ was performed in the UK, would the performance fall under fair dealing for the purposes of criticism and review? If so why? If not, why not?

Consider the quote above from Ramsay Burt’s book. Would this be fair dealing for the purposes of quotation?

Having read the synopsis of the Deckmyn case in the text, can you think of any dance works that could be classified as parody, pastiche or caricature?

Split Screen

Now consider the following video:

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What are the copyright issues that arise from this? Is fair dealing relevant in this case?  

Consider your response and then think about your practice. Do any copyright issues arise with your practice?