This lesson has the students read a Washington Post article dated December 6, 2018 with the title “Is Fortnite stealing black dance culture? The creator of the‘Milly Rock’ argues yes in a new lawsuit.”
In essence the Supreme court ruled that you can’t sue for copyright infringement if you don’t currently hold a copyright. And this leads into a much larger discussion of what is or is not copyrightable.
the moral of this is that the legal world is quite complex and is better left to the legal experts. This lesson should pick a better example, or at least point out that the real world is very complex from a legal perspective.
We did this lesson today. In addition to the follow-up article for the lawsuit, I looked for a video showing the dance. Hard to find a video that would be appropriate in classroom, but I found this tutorial. The first 15 seconds show the dance moves in question in a clean environment.
The video tutorial also adds a great deal to this discussion. The video made by MihranTV shows the tutorial viewed 1.4 million times, and a YouTube channel subscriber rate of 2.5 million. YouTube will pay up to around $6 per 1,000 views, so having 1.4 million views could have resulted in a profit up to around $8,400. The comments on the YouTube video also ask for donations, meaning the profit could be even higher.
I have no clue if there is a licensing agreement between MihranTV and the rapper Milly, but I would suspect not. This can enhance the discussion on copyright to discuss derivative works and provide an example of potential monetary gain.
I was also searching for an “updated” article for this lesson. While this article is interesting, it doesn’t really relate the idea of copyright infringement to the choices the students themselves will be making as they interact with digital content.
jgwilson, the Copyright Law of 2021 has not passed congress. It is simply a wishlist proposed by a congressman. I have the same problem with the original Washington Post article is that both are opinion pieces and should not be used to illustrate concrete facts.
Regarding this lesson on Intellectual Property, when students in my class read the article, while most agreed 2 Milly was being harmed by Epic games, few to none felt like the harm to 2 Milly was intended. I’m wondering if this is nuance in how the question is posed, or if I’m missing something. To me Epic must have realized they would be profiting from this dance and not only didn’t bother to license it from him, but also filed to have his lawsuit dropped. The lawsuit ultimately didn’t proceed based more on the legal technicalities that 2 Milly hadn’t copyrighted the dance, which although interestingunfortunate from a copyright standpoint (do you literally have to copyright everything?),it doesn’t change the fact that Epic had to know they were being unethical and knowingly harming 2 Milly. So I’m struggling to get my students to appreciate this and wondering how others have approached this.
I guess the prompt on the lesson slides is the same, if someone took your pixel art and sold it on T-shirts, clearly the harm is intentional in my mind. But somehow they don’t really see it.
I went back to school and got another CS degree close to my retirement age. I had similar discussions when the professors gave lectures on the topic of plagiarism. I don’t have a photographic memory, but I do memorize faster than most and I do have an eye for details. My discussion with professors centered around the idea that few people in life are the original inventors of things. Most of what we learn through school and college is simply regurgitating knowledge we have been exposed to. The professor said if I turned in code that exactly matched the code of a Google Search I would be guilty of plagiarism and cut-n-paste is not acceptable. My challenge was that if I could come into his office, pull out a scratch piece of paper, and write the code completely from memory down to a single character, is that plagiarism? How can I unlearn algorithms that I have seen before? I am not the inventor of algorithms such as bubble sort or Dijkstra’s algorithm, but maybe they just stick in my mind! I was told this is not plagiarism if I could demonstrate that level of memory.
I think this is similar to Epic. Someone ( a programmer ) probably saw a YouTube video and recreated the moves without willful harm or intent. Much like the Dance Studio I published above receiving monetary pay from YouTube for having millions of views and subscribers while performing the Milly Rock. In the video, he said it was “his take” on how to do the Milly Rock.
Even if Milly had filed for a copyright application, he would have run into the issue that many things are not copyrightable! You cannot copyright individual movements that can be observed in many dances. You can copyright a lengthy choreography.
I am content with leaving my students with the knowledge that the legal world is complex and an opportunity for those students to pursue careers in legal justice, patent attornies, copyright and trademark dispute attornies, etc.
It is not as simple as what Code.org or Creative Commons is trying to teach. I do teach the students though how they have to answer any questions from the College Board related to this topic.
