Following Up

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the copyright dispute over Bikram Yoga. This controversy actually was brought up in my International IP class yesterday. So, it turns out, that it did go to court briefly, when Open Source Yoga Unity (yes, that's what it's actually called) sued Bikram Choudhury, seeking a declaratory judgment that they were not infringing (2005 WL 756558). There was apparently a denial of summary judgment for the plaintiffs, where the trial court judge ruled that if, at trial, they found that the poses were arranged in a "sufficiently unique manner," they would be protected under copyright law. The court said that there was:

a dispute of fact on the issue of whether sufficient creativity exists in the Bikram yoga routine so that copyright protection attaches, and thus summary judgment on both copyright validity and copyright invalidity must be denied.

But this was never decided. Instead, at this point, the parties chose to make an out of court settlement, so there was no final answer. Apparently, though, at the time people were starting to worry that football plays could be copyrighted, because they're clearly as choreographed as Bikram Yoga is. But nothing seems to have ever come of that.

Meanwhile, on the Facebook front, it has announced that it is introducing both a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (to replace the existing TOS) as well as "Facebook Principles." I skimmed them both. The Principles seem pretty vague/mission statement-esque, but I guess that's to be expected. I didn't really read all of the Statement, but I looked at Section 2, which deals with sharing of content and information. It's interesting that FB is trying to adapt to user concerns, but I'm not sure how 2.2 and 2.3 work with each other in a legal sense. If the IP license you grant to FB ends when you terminate your account, as claimed in 2.3, then 2.2 definitely goes beyond this. And 2.2 kind of sticks in, at the end of the sentence, that "content shared with others may remain until they delete it." Which gives FB lots of latitude, because really, anything you put on FB is "content shared with others" -- that's what FB is! So if it suited FB's fancy, couldn't it say any photos, status updates, etc., that you uploaded were "content shared with others," and thus wouldn't have to be deleted upon termination of your account? I think the broad language of 2.2 kind of completely overrules 2.3.

Thoughts?