Are instructional dance step floor diagrams a patented concept?

September 8, 2022 12:23 PM

Friend of mine wants to start teaching dance and wonders--you know, the roll out mats that have dance steps on them? Like this. Arthur Murray used to send them out by mail order. Is this kind of instructional tool owned by anyone, or can anyone make or paint or have printed their own diagrams to use for classes?
posted by Gymnopedist to Law & Government (5 answers total)

Pretty sure I have seen that style of diagram from instructional books from the 50's/60's/70's, etc. I am guessing it is a public domain technique, but I am not a copyright/patent expert.
posted by rozcakj at 12:29 PM on September 8, 2022

Dance Manuals have been around for 500+ years, but they were textual.

Dance Diagrams / Dance Notation / Dance Step instructions have been around since the early 1900's - but those are more for ballroom/ballet:
- Visual culture of efficiency and dance diagrams (Paris, 20 Jun 22)

Shorthand dance notation (textual)

This is fascinating. There appears to be no standard for the top-down dance-step diagram notation (see "Box Step")
posted by rozcakj at 12:50 PM on September 8, 2022

Patents only last 25 years, so even if those diagrams were patented at some point, they certainly aren't any longer.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 3:49 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Dance step diagrams aren't the type of thing that could be patented. However, any specific dance step diagram that someone else made will definitely fall under copyright law. So if you were to make, say, photocopies or scans of some of those Arthur Murray dance step diagrams and just use them, that is almost certainly going to be a copyright violation.

However, if you just make your own dance step diagram - even if it is substantially similar to some other dance step diagrams out there, due to the fact that dance steps are dance steps - then you're in the clear copyright-wise.

(Copyright covers the specific expression of something, like how it is put down in words or images or sound files or whatever. But copyright does not cover the underlying idea - those can't be copyrighted. So just make your own original dance step diagrams and go to town.)
posted by flug at 9:22 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Growing up in the 70's my grandparents had this big like 5 inch thick dictionary that the last section had like visual infographic like pages of everything from ice skating to boating to fencing to ballet to pages of dance steps.

Yep there is copyright for using other's work as your own, but making your own would be just fine.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:53 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]