Underseer
Contributor
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/18/alfonso-ribeiro-suing-fortnite-makers-over-the-carlton-dance-.html
OK, I'm not sure if Ribeiro or the production company that made the Fresh Prince TV show would own the copyright to that dance, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make.
The point is that this is something that has been going on for years.
For example, in the MMORPG World of Warcraft, every single race/gender combination has a unique dance that is based on a famous dance done by someone else. If you've never played the game, here are the dances for each gender of each race along with the famous dances they imitate:
World of Warcraft is full of pop culture references that probably skirt the edge of copyright law. I assume they can get away with it by passing it all off as "homages" to the referenced works.
And this is not uncommon in games. Heck, one of the first graphical MMORPGs Asheron's Call even had an emote that was clearly ripped off from a famous Toyota commercial in America. To make your character do the emote, you just typed in the word Toyota backward after the appropriate "do an emote" delimiter character. I'm sure Toyota had that move copyrighted, but I don't remember the publisher of Asheron's Call getting sued over that.
So various "homages" have been showing up in games for a long time that sort of skirt the edges of copyright law.
What makes this different is that Epic Games is charging Fortnite players money to be able to do those particular dance moves with their game characters. If they are selling those dance moves for money, then I think they really owe whoever owns the copyright to those dance moves money. When you're charging money for that specific thing, you have crossed an important line. Asheron's Call and World of Warcraft were already skirting the line because they were charging everyone a subscription for access to their games, so technically they were making money off of someone else's work, but they weren't charging a separate microtransaction fee (or worse, using loot boxes) to sell those specific copyrighted materials to customers.
OK, I'm not sure if Ribeiro or the production company that made the Fresh Prince TV show would own the copyright to that dance, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make.
The point is that this is something that has been going on for years.
For example, in the MMORPG World of Warcraft, every single race/gender combination has a unique dance that is based on a famous dance done by someone else. If you've never played the game, here are the dances for each gender of each race along with the famous dances they imitate:
[YOUTUBE]XlPddvw3IMY[/YOUTUBE]
World of Warcraft is full of pop culture references that probably skirt the edge of copyright law. I assume they can get away with it by passing it all off as "homages" to the referenced works.
And this is not uncommon in games. Heck, one of the first graphical MMORPGs Asheron's Call even had an emote that was clearly ripped off from a famous Toyota commercial in America. To make your character do the emote, you just typed in the word Toyota backward after the appropriate "do an emote" delimiter character. I'm sure Toyota had that move copyrighted, but I don't remember the publisher of Asheron's Call getting sued over that.
So various "homages" have been showing up in games for a long time that sort of skirt the edges of copyright law.
What makes this different is that Epic Games is charging Fortnite players money to be able to do those particular dance moves with their game characters. If they are selling those dance moves for money, then I think they really owe whoever owns the copyright to those dance moves money. When you're charging money for that specific thing, you have crossed an important line. Asheron's Call and World of Warcraft were already skirting the line because they were charging everyone a subscription for access to their games, so technically they were making money off of someone else's work, but they weren't charging a separate microtransaction fee (or worse, using loot boxes) to sell those specific copyrighted materials to customers.
