Copyright in choreography in the age of AI
Dancers and choreographers have not yet made a lot of noise in this regard. In their case, we are not usually talking about millions in royalties and valuable licensing agreements. When there are disputes in relation to unauthorised use of movement, it is largely connected to the gaming industry. The issue with ownership of movement is all the more complicated in the digital age, since dance historically relied on interpretative tradition rather than rigid copyright. The latter became a live issue in dance around the turn of the 20th century.
The turning point came with the development of copyright legislation itself, but dance was far behind literature and music in this regard. One of the first people to recognise choreography as an artwork entitled to copyright protection, was Michail Fokin (1880–1942). He repeatedly fought against the theft of his ballet ensemble choreography and systematically stood up for the idea that choreography is an original artwork that should not be arbitrarily copied and restaged without the author’s consent. Around the same time, the first disputes of this kind began to appear, in many ways reminiscent of today’s copyright cases – especially in terms of whether it is possible to own a movement form, structure, or composition. So, choreography copyright was legally established in most countries throughout the 20th century (e.g. in the USA, choreography officially became a protected authorial work with the introduction of The Copyright Act of 1976).
At the same time, there are, of course, many artists whose legacy is carefully guarded (the most well-known being Kenneth MacMillan, George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, John Cranko, among others), and even though there have been initiatives to draw greater attention to this problem and authors have been published on the subject.1 Unlike works of literature or visual art, where copyright operates as a decent defence against unrestrained copying, dance continues to enjoy very little legal protection. It is hard to categorise movement as “intellectual property”, so AI does not need any permission to appropriate it.
Today, algorithms regularly analyse choreographic patterns without the author ever agreeing to be part of the digital archive. Yet, no- one is currently able to stop, for example, MacMillian’s well-guarded production of Romeo and Juliet (of which there are hundreds of recordings on YouTube alone) being used for machine learning and then even copied in some form by AI. Finding the line between a step, which is hard to copyright, and a sequence of steps, which may be considered original choreography, has been a great challenge for the dance community since the origins of the copyright discussion, but today, when it is possible to use AI to read and generate virtually in real time, this problem becomes even more complicated, and patently more urgent.