So, today I make myself some lunch after some mildly off-pissing car stuff, and figure I’ll read some Slashdot while I eat. Anyway, just idly following links, next thing you know I’m buried deep in PDFs of legal filings. Lawyers nuking security sites by going after their domain registrars with DMCA threats (they can’t lawyer them off their ISPs, because the sites haven’t done anything illegal, and ISPs kind of enjoy their common-carrier status); the registrar GoDaddy bowing to all sorts of other ‘requests’. Miscellaneous DMCA abuses. SLAPP attempts by media giants. The National Pork Board attacking a breastfeeding activist (seriously, wtf?).
Oh, and slightly off on a tangent, our marketing geniuses mentioned earlier are expected to each get five years in the slammer, equivalent to committing a 2nd degree sexual assault while selling old ladies fake prescription medications*. For sticking rude cartoon figures to a bridge. Yyyyyeah.
Now, the alleged creator of that old line dance, The Electric Slide, is nuking videos from peoples’ weddings, school dances, and other materials showing people performing the dance, off of Youtube and other places using DMCA (copyright) complaints. Highlighted in the CNN article is a takedown notice received by qdot (who I’m vaguely familiar with as a result of the TranceVibe project), for a videoblog he posted from a dance at a furry convention in San Jose**… I saw the video. In the grainy darkness you can vaguely make out that people in animal costumes are dancing, and with a bit of imagination you can see a few steps of Electric Slide in there, barely. Electric Slide Guy is also going after someone who danced a variant of it on stilts on The Today Show (and presumably, the Today Show itself), The Ellen DeGeneres Show, an associate professor of exercise science, and “several Hollywood companies” for featuring the dance somewhere.
So, let that be a lesson to “y’all”. Line dancing may be bad for your health. (Specifically, it could rip you a new one.)
* at least according to the only crime/time curve I could conveniently find, published by the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission. If sexual assault isn’t your game, you could commit an armed robbery followed by a nonresidential burglary. Yikes, this thing reads like a menu. puts away sentencing sheet and stops contemplating a life of criminal mayhem
** are ALL 2007 geek/scifi/anime/fringe/etc. cons going to have James Bond-themed logos? (guessing it’s the 2007 |grep 007 thing)
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