David Moore – “Pocket Aces”

So, for those of you who don’t know who dmoore is, he’s another sick choreographer from LA. He’s worked with tons of great choreographers, artists, and producers, and has some of the craziest videos on all of youtube. He’s been out here to the Chi to teach a few classes, and I was lucky enough to be around last summer when he taught to “You” by Chris Brown.

Anyhow, he put up a sick video about a month ago called “pocket aces”. In it was one of his sickest routines, complete with a setting/backstory and his signature epic introductions to the videos. Unfortunately, it was tagged by youtube as part of their ongoing “audio track not authorized” track. Finally, it’s back, and I think it’s definitely worth watching.

What was posted on youtube:

The full video:

I’d also like to use this as a springboard for some discussion about youtube’s policy. This is going to be somewhat long and drawn-out, and is certainly not relevant to everyone who visits this page. In short, the rest of this post is dedicated to discussing how youtube’s policy of removing audio tracks from all videos that have music that is identified by their software to be copyrighted material. Facebook, vimeo, and viddler all have their own mechanisms of dealing with it, but I am using youtube as the primary focus because it is the medium that I have the most experience with, and certainly has the highest market share, if you will, of online video streaming.

While I can understand the major labels’ motivation for taking action against people who use youtube to post music/music videos that they do not own, I believe that from the perspective of choreographers posting their own work on youtube, the labels have made a major error in taking action for the audio tracks of the video.

Now, wikipedia cites the principle of “fair use” from U.S. copyright law as defined by these four principles:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

I believe that choreographers who use songs to create their work have added substantial value to the song beyond simply using a song as background music for a random video. Oftentimes, a choreographer’s work is tied closely to the song that was used, rendering a piece/combo nearly useless without the audio track.

So let’s examine those four principles of fair use. The purpose of the use of the audio track may indeed be commercial, such as when choreographers submit reels of their work to producers, directors, or indeed even artists in attempt to land jobs. However, I believe that the nature of this usage is tied directly to the dance industry, and is not something unique to youtube or other online video sites. As previously mentioned, a piece of choreography without the accompanying music is essentially useless, but that is exactly what youtube’s specific approach to this dilemma has been. So then what sort of solution could be found to permit choreographers to share the entirety of their work? Are the labels going to charge royalties to the choreographers for using the audio track on youtube? Practical difficulties aside, what then would stop them charging royalties for classes or workshops that play music? I contend that this approach would be detrimental both to the recording industry and the dance community.

In relation to the first and fourth principles, it is very true that choreographers can post their pieces on youtube to promote themselves for commercial work. However, I don’t believe that they are resulting in an unreasonable detriment to the intellectual/artistic value of the audio track. If anything, I myself have a number of times immediately gone to AmazonMP3 to buy a song from a video that just struck me. Even further, I personally find myself preferentially listening to songs that I tie to a specific video/routine, and find myself buying other songs or even complete albums by the same artist, just because a choreographer made a piece that completely blew me away.

I don’t have a solution. I don’t believe that youtube should just throw the doors wide open and remove the disable audio feature entirely. I have seen plenty of youtube videos where there is no video, only the audio track. The video could be at best simply blank, but there are plenty of them that spam with links and pop-in bubbles trying to get you to buy a ringtone, or subscribe to some service. These types of infringement need to be regulated, as they are detrimental to the industry (I doubt many of them pay proper royalties to the labels, and therefore to the artists themselves) as well as to the consumer (I personally find those videos to be irritating, low-quality, and generally useless for what I was trying to accomplish by looking up that song on youtube).

I don’t agree with youtube’s current approach of allowing users to “Audio Sync” the track in exchange for allowing a link to iTunes/AmazonMP3 to appear on the video. The feature is time-consuming, clunky, and indeed not utilized by most users in the situation. It is far easier to upload the video to another site or alter the audio and reupload to youtube, rather than struggle through trying to set up the audio through Audio Sync. Since choreography is so rhythmically dependent, it is even more important that the audio track be perfectly synced to the video track.

What I would suggest generally as good steps would be for youtube to have some kind of approval process, where artists of any kind who would like to use copyrighted audio for work such as a choreography piece will have the iTunes/AmazonMP3 popup in the bottom of their screen. Personally, I would find that immensely useful as a direct link to getting the song, instead of needing to delve through the sidebar info or the comments to try and find a track title, and then searching Amazon or iTunes manually to find the song. I understand that this is a naive perspective that would be rather impractical to implement, but perhaps this idea may provide a jumping off point for a truly practical solution to be found.

Again, I don’t have a solution. I realize there is a lot that I haven’t covered here, and I consider this post to be a sort of work-in-progress. I will be soliciting feedback so that I can expand and improve upon this, hopefully to the point where this can be of some use to the community. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have comments regarding this. This will be regularly updated on my google docs, and I’ll try to keep it up-to-date on this site as well.

Relevant info:

• Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dc9gdxms_0fgkgs8dq
• WordPress Blog:
• My youtube username: subtlerhythm
• WordPress username: ch1apet

[DISCLAIMER] I have no experience in copyright law. I have minimal experience in the dance industry, being more of an avid fan and a passionate hobbyist than an actual member of the industry. I wrote this because I feel like through this issue, everyone from the consumer to the artist to the labels is suffering. Please feel free to distribute this to whomever you like, but keep these last few bits so that any feedback can make its way back to me.

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What you guys are missing out on =]

redef workshop for the win!

choreographer: Jon Jovellanos, director of redef

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choreographer: Bev Bautista and Kat Amante

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choreographer: Don Martinez, MD

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See guys! Summer is a great time to train. Hope you all are dancing, wherever in the world you guys may be at this point, whatever you’re doing. Even if you can’t find classes, keep watching videos, finding inspiration, and practicing (even if it’s just in the shower for a few minutes =] )

paz

An Epiphany

People often ask me, why a ReFresH bunny?

The answer to that question eluded me for some time. I could never seem to put my finger on it. For some reason, it just seemed right, but to put it into words required a much more thorough understanding than I had. I have given many answers, but none fully satisfying… until now. It’s funny how sometimes when you’re not looking for answers, the answers come find you. A few days ago, I was languising in Apt 2A, pondering the events of the day. A number of people had gathered and we were all talking, sharing in laughs and stories. As the people dwindled, it became just Fannie, Nick, myself and Joe. If you asked me how the conversation came to this topic, I couldn’t tell you, however, it did and it was Fannie who spoke on it. She said, “I know why it’s a ReFresH bunny. I mean you’ve probably already thought of this but…” and she puased before continuing. And what she said next was amazing. So simple, yet it made so much sense. In my opinion, there is no better answer to this question.

And so you ask, why is it a ReFresH bunny?

Well, because it’s hip hop.