Gray goods - in black and white; Electric Slide

The Gray Blog is the impressive offering from IP attorney Jorge Espinosa of Miami, Fl. law firm Kluger Peretz Kaplan & Berlin, who tells the IPKat that he's trying to carve out a slightly different focus by concentrating on parallel market legal issues. The blog is new and, like most serious new offerings, is clearly trying hard to establish its credentials. The projected coverage is wide - China, Latin America, Europe (and specifically Spain) are in the author's sights - and the writing is measured and informative. Until he read this, the IPKat had no idea that grey goods (as he likes to spell them) were an interstate issue and that California, Connecticut and New York have their own statutes on parallel market commercial goods. For more information, you can read the Gray Blog here.

Gray or grey? Read on, here, here and here
Grey's Anatomy here
Lady Jane Grey here

The IPKat is endebted to Miri Frankel once again for sending him an article with an alarmingly long name, "Blame It On The Boogie: "Electric Slide" Dance Inventor Sued For DMCA Takedown Demands Over Youtube Video", by John Stephens, which you can read here on the Sedgwick Detert Moran & Arnold website. Essentially this is about an action that digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation is bringing against Richard Silver, the man who says he created the Electric Slide, over what it deems to be baseless copyright claims (Machulis v Silver, 3:07-cv-1235-BZ).

Right: a different Electric Slide, invented by themissy.com

The EFF says Silver's takedown demands constitute baseless copyright claims that resulted in YouTube removing a non-infringing video that included a scene of concertgoers attempting to do the Electric Slide. Silver says he owns the copyright in the dance; Machulis made a film of a number of good folk attempting to dance it and that the hosting of this film therefore infringes his rights. The EFF thinks not, and hopes the case will result in a precedent-setting judgment that will discourage people from abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) "takedown process," by which parties can demand that web hosts such as YouTube remove allegedly infringing material. The IPKat wonders whether this is the best way to ban synchronised swimming too. Merpel says, the article says:

"a badly performed version of the dance may still be protected as it may be a derivative of the original. But a really terrible version of the dance, one with many missteps, would not be covered".

That should keep us Kats out of court, she chortles.

Footnote: having written all this, the IPKat discovers that the dispute settled on 22 May - Silver has agreed to allow use under a Creative Commons licence, but will be credited as the dance's choreographer.