4 ms·
> The site is a trading post for stolen, pirated and unlawfully copied tricks, which are covered by copyright, trademarks or other intellectual property in much
by TillE 10y ago
> The site is a trading post for stolen, pirated and unlawfully copied tricks, which are covered by copyright, trademarks or other intellectual property in much the same way that TV shows and films are.
A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick". You can patent a process, but of course this reveals it to the public.
Most of the described contents of the tracker are commercially released products. That's really not "stealing tricks" in any way.
- regularfry 10y ago> A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick". Interestingly, this isn't quite true. People are trying to exert copyright over the specific motions under choreography protection.
- clort 10y agoI wonder how this would go down in a court of law, in that the specific motions they are claiming copyright on were /obfuscated/ or downright /concealed/ from view. I wonder if you can legally be considered to have copied something you have not seen..
- regularfry 10y agoI suppose what you'd end up copyrighting is the final effect, not how it's achieved. Which is, I guess, the point.
- manarth 10y agoWithout knowledge of the finer points of copyright law (IANAL), is this (the final effect) even copyrightable?
- rileymat2 10y ago[conplete speculation, by me] They may be using the copyright of things they don't care about to shutdown the site to eliminate the things they do care about which they have no legal means to eliminate directly.
- simplicio 10y agoMy understanding is that tricks aren't copywritable, but performances are. So magicians have sometimes successfully sued each-other over copying not just a trick but their delivery of said trick. That was the justification for the Penn and Teller lawsuit mentioned in the article But I think the issue with the site discussed in the article is mainly just copyrighted material:, books, videos and the like.
- CalChris 10y agoMagic tricks can be patented. https://www.google.com/patents/US6623366 https://www.google.com/patents/US6623366 And of course they can be trade secreted. Can they be copyrighted? That I dunno. A performance can be copyrighted. But the ideas? Probably not.