IP Rights Over Programs

Do IP rights exist in figure skating with respect to programs? If so, who "owns" them? Is it the choreographer'(s) [only]?

Imagine for example, that Figure Skater worked with Choreographer on a program. Figure Skater and Choreographer have a falling out and discontinue their professional relationship. Figure Skater then is invited to a show during the off season. Can Figure Skater perform a program that was done by Choreographer?

Christopher Dean discusses this issue in one of his and Jayne Torvill's autobiographies. (I think it was published as Facing the Music in the US.) I don't have my copy to hand, but IIRC, on one of their relatively early post-Olympic tours, a choreographer got into a dispute with the tour management and walked out, leaving it uncertain whether the skaters could perform the programs the choreographer had created. I don't remember how that issue was ultimately resolved; what I do remember is that T/D drew from the episode the conclusion that Dean needed to be proactive about asserting the rights to his own choreography, which was not something they'd considered before. [ETA:] I don't actually know how they went about doing that, and I'm not sure that they went into any further detail, but you've certainly put your finger on a real issue, not a hypothetical worst-case scenario.

Is it common for figure skaters to sign an agreement with choreographers when they work together? The skater could, I guess, insist that the program created belong to him/her, in consideration for the amount paid to the choreographer for creating the program. However, and practice could vary depending on the federation involved, do figure skaters (I mean those who participate in international competitions), actually pay this cost on their own? In that sense, actually then it could be the federation and the choreographer who actually are the proper parties, the figure skater merely a third-party beneficiary.

NoviceFan said:

Do IP rights exist in figure skating with respect to programs? If so, who "owns" them? Is it the choreographer'(s) [only]?

Imagine for example, that Figure Skater worked with Choreographer on a program. Figure Skater and Choreographer have a falling out and discontinue their professional relationship. Figure Skater then is invited to a show during the off season. Can Figure Skater perform a program that was done by Choreographer?

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Yes. Attempting to copyright choreography is more or less a fool’s errand, since any legal claim is pretty much dead on arrival. Social norms would probably make said performance unlikely, but the choreographer does not necessarily “own” the work they’ve created. (And the choreographer almost certainly didn’t create the music for the programme they designed, which adds another layer to the clusterbleep.)

I may be wrong but I seem to remember that Grishuk and Platov had a legal battle over their programs in 1996-97 after they left Natalie Linichuk who claimed to have choreographed them. If I'm wrong about that i apologize, it's hard for me to remember 20 years ago.

Metis said:

Yes. Attempting to copyright choreography is more or less a fool’s errand, since any legal claim is pretty much dead on arrival. Social norms would probably make said performance unlikely, but the choreographer does not necessarily “own” the work they’ve created. (And the choreographer almost certainly didn’t create the music for the programme they designed, which adds another layer to the clusterbleep.)

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Actually, dance choreography can be copyrighted and has been since at least the 1950s. The George Balanchine Trust holds the copyrights to Balanchine's ballets and licenses companies to perform them, for example. A quick Google search turns up several articles on the law and its history, if you're curious:

https://web.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/copyrigh.html
https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&context=plr

I imagine that an ice dance or figure skating program could meet the legal tests described in the second article (authorship, originality, and fixation). Whether the same could be said of, say, a balance beam routine seems more ambiguous to me, as the proportion of "original" to commonplace movements would be much smaller.

ribbit said:

Actually, dance choreography can be copyrighted and has been since at least the 1950s. The George Balanchine Trust holds the copyrights to Balanchine's ballets and licenses companies to perform them, for example. A quick Google search turns up several articles on the law and its history, if you're curious:

https://web.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/copyrigh.html
https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&context=plr

I imagine that an ice dance or figure skating program could meet the legal tests described in the second article (authorship, originality, and fixation). Whether the same could be said of, say, a balance beam routine seems more ambiguous to me, as the proportion of "original" to commonplace movements would be much smaller.

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I didn’t claim choreo can’t be copyrighted. I’m suggesting that attempting to press a case over the issue is almost automatically a losing battle, as the nature of dance makes certain counter-arguments much more difficult to argue against than a “sample located” kind of claim. And most choreographers likely don’t have the money to sue. Can you copyright a routine? Yes. Is pressing a case over the issue necessarily a wise use of resources (time, money)?

Yes because I would think that the choreographer would be commissioned on a work-for-hire basis and that the end result of the work belongs to the people who commissioned them and not the person who crafted the work. It wouldn't matter so much with something like Stars on Ice or an individual skater. It's sort of like if Justin Peck broke away from the NYCB, they could still perform works he had choreographed for them specifically under an employee contract but they wouldn't be able to stage something that was commissioned for him to do on his own.

The real IP infringement is whether or not another skater could use that choreographed program.

I should imagine choreography works in a similar way to photography: the copyright of a photograph belongs to the person who pays for it to be taken unless another arrangement is specified in the contract; the copyright of a skating program would belong to the person who pays for it to be created, unless it was otherwise specified in the contract. It would have to be handled as 'copyright of a complete piece of work', though, because of how often skaters tend to reuse elements, steps and phrases.

The last two posts, by Ducky and Hartriet must be right. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

I am not a lawyer, but for a competitive figure skating program, for instance, it seems like the skater pays the choreographer. After that, the skater can skate the program, modify it, throw it in the trash, whatever. In the case of a show, the producer hires the choreographer and receives ownership of the commissioned works.

I don't know what kind of contracts skaters have with choreographers they hire to choreograph competitive programs for them.

Just as a logical guess, in that situation I'd expect the program would be considered a work for hire and the property of the person who paid for it (i.e., the skater). After all, the whole point of a competition program is to showcase that particular skater's skills.

For show programs, it might be more that the choreographer's vision is the whole point and the skaters are just hired performers to bring that vision to life. So the choreographer would own the rights. Or the producer who hired the choreographer.

For solos, or duets by established pairs/dance teams, that the skaters might perform in other contexts, then it might be more complicated. (E.g., when there was a pro competition circuit where skaters/teams might compete with the same programs they were performing in shows.)

I think that gkelly and Mathman must be right that the question of "works of authorship" vs. "works for hire", and thus the question of who holds the copyright in a piece of choreography, depends on the precise nature of the contract between the choreographer and the person who pays the bills. In either case, IP rights and the potential to copyright a piece of choreography would exist, as the OP asks. The question would be, who would have the right to claim the IP or copyright: the choreographer or the employer?

It would certainly be possible to draw up a contract that assigned those rights to either party; my own employment contract (in a different field) explicitly states that I retain the rights to all intellectual property I create during my employment, and I imagine that a sufficiently prestigious choreographer might be in a position to insist on a similar clause in his or her contract. (I'd be curious to know the terms under which, say, Christopher Wheeldon or Alexei Ratmansky create their ballets.)

Dean might be a bad example for me to have started from, since he's clearly an outlier, but he's also an interesting test case, since he's in the rare position of having created choreography for himself (and his partner). My memory and my knowledge of the details are hazy, but I think that he and Torvill were involved in the production of at least some of the shows for which he choreographed. T/D's competitive programs would presumably meet the "works of authorship" test, since he would have been working for himself rather than an employer who might be able to claim intellectual property in his work under the "works for hire" doctrine. Depending on the precise nature of the production agreements, so might those show programs.

What Torvill's rights in these works, if any, might be is an interesting question, though one I can't answer, not being a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination. What would happen if she wanted to perform "Bolero" with someone else on Dancing on Ice, without Dean's approval? What about a piece from "Fire on Ice"?