This is a tricky situation.
While it’s true that Alphonso Ribero can’t copyright these simple moves as a ‘dance’ (which would set a weird precedent that the court doesn’t want to touch), it was proven that they didn’t just copy his moves in a general sense – they literally sampled video of him doing this dance and traced it, move-for-move, for the game.
So while Fortnite should be allowed to use it, not giving him or the show credit or money of any sort – and they have no shortage of cash to thank them with – is kinda dickish.
Source on that? If it was like rotoscoped, then fair point. But they would have to model the animation in 3 dimensions, not 2, which means while derivitive, they had to introduce their own new work to make the animation.
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Mmm - that doesn’t really support your argument. If any thing it supports mine. The live action example is “wilder” with the limbs going out more, and me freezing it on frames shows things like the alignment of the spine and angles of the limbs are different.
Now, of course this may not be their source material they copied from.
And I am not disputing they copied the dance, only that they didn’t necessarily copy it exactly from a specific performance. Honestly I would be surprised if they didn’t use motion capture for the dances, which would require a recreation, not a copy, but that is an assumption.
I would think that a clearly rotoscoped video that matches an animation frame-for-frame would support my argument that they um, rotoscoped a video (and then, yes, adapted it to various 3D models) as they did for many other dances copied from videos. But, if it doesn’t look rotoscoped to you, that’s fine. I’ll keep assuming.
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Sorry, man, just grabbing random frames from your video, nothing lines up. It is the same moves, but the exact angles and positions are different. Like I said, it could be the wrong source. It could also not be synched up well. (Though that’s kinda on your for presenting it as evidence.)
OK - I went and googled it. According to two comments in Reddit threads by people at Epic, they hand key the animation and one emote can take up to a week to make. So it seems to me even though they surely used a video for reference, they had to spend considerable time to translate it from a 2D image, to movement with a 3D model, as well as adding their own flourishes to create the animation. I have to say the one thing I do find interesting when @jlw posts those 10hr loops of emotes is how smooth and “poppy” the animation is. Which in my book, while derivative, is still it’s own version of the performance. Just like if you or I were to record the dance, we could get the motions down and on the correct beat. Well, you, not me. I can’t dance, even before my leg went to shit.
SOURCES:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FortNiteBR/comments/7jtgpw/whoever_made_this_animation_deserves_a_raise/
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Which would presumably be why the claim was for a series of dance steps.
I have to say reading the letter, it strikes me as stating that “Your submission does not count as choreography because we say so”.
They essentially say “simple routines” are not copyrightable. This is a ‘simple routine’. Therefore it is not copyrightable.
But they don’t say anything about what makes something a “simple routine” as opposed to something that can be copyrighted.
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