FarCry 2 also had the least memorable characters . . . except for the over-the-top, suicidal, psychotic arms dealer you were hunting / helping. You could forgive Ubisoft from looking at the game and thinking, “OK, we need to make every guy that guy.”

We shouldn’t expect gritty realism from FarCry. Because no matter what the setting, no matter who the villain is, it’s still played against the backdrop of a lone hero killing literally thousands of guys.

The point of owning an unregistered copyright is that you can collect damages for past copyright infringement, even if the copyright was unregistered when the infringement began. You lose out on those sweet, sweet statutory damages I mentioned before. But if you can prove with reasonable certainty what you should have…

Well the debate is whether that distinction matters.

Oooh, actually you do need a copyright registration to sue. You do not need a copyright registration to own a copyright. But you need one to file suit.  The law is 17 U.S.C. § 411.  

Trademarks have to be registered, though, and it would take a colossally incompetent lawyer to think you could sue for trademark infringement without a registered trademark to point at...

What part of “You can’t just take another person’s (or company’s) work and use it for your own” you don’t get?

It’s not a slippery slope. It’s just the law.

What’s the cutoff for short phrases? Because the infamously copyrighted “Lets get ready to rumble!!!” is only five words long.

The guy is the clear creator of the dance, u can’t take the moves, animate and sell them without giving him credit

Copyright vests the moment the artists puts pen to paper. It exists when the work is created. When we talk about “copyrighting” something, what we really mean is registering the copyright with the federal government. But the copyright already exists . . . if it’s copyrightable.

Copyright infringement does not require the infringer to receive direct compensation. Remember Napster? The fact that people didn’t get paid for ripping and sharing CDs didn’t mean they didn’t infringe a copyright.

I’m going to disagree with you there. Copyrights belong to authors for things of sufficient creativity and originality. Now, for most purposes, that isn’t a high hurdle, but it can be a dicey area for graphic designers, particularly in the areas of advertising and promotion.

Choreography can by copyrighted, yes. But that doesn’t mean a dance move can be. Adding choreography and dances in general to copyright law was intended to provide protection for things like ballets, plays, musical productions, etc. It probably also covers, say, the entire choreography for a music video. Sometimes the…

nobody is arguing that homie OWNS the dance, but it was created by him and is now being used for a profit without any mention of the man himself.

My money is on Epic coming to some settlement with creators over the use of their dance after a lot of backroom discussion.

To reframe it slightly - if someone took a comic book character and made a cosplay of it, would the creator even care? Probably not. But if a major Hollywood studio took that same character and put him in a $200m movie, would the author care then? Gee I guess the author must be some money grubbing scumbag who only…

Yeah, that actually might be copyrightable, but it is a close question. Since the helmet looks like it’s a mostly standard design, with a short phrase ad a few non-original elements (bullets, a peace symbol), then I could make a strong case that the FMJ helmet is not copyrightable. But maybe there’s enough originality…

So here’s one big hurdle. The amount of creativity needed to create something copyrightable is normally very, very generous. It’s called a “modicum of creativity.” Anything more than a modicum is copyrightable.

I’m pretty hopeful about this.