Download Squad

Here are the details: A software engineer named Kyle Machulis and his friends were at a convention, and taped themselves performing a dance move known as the electric slide. For some reason, they felt compelled to share this video with the world, so they did what countless others did before them and put it up on YouTube. Then, in February they were served a takedown notice for the video. Now, as anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of seeing nerds dance can tell you, it is definitely offensive and probably shouldn't be viewed by anyone under the age of 21. But that wasn't the reason why the video was pulled. Richard Silver, who created the electric slide in the 1970's, filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act claim and had the video shut down. In an interview with CNET News, Silver claimed that the video, and others like it, were ruining his dance by showing it as 18-steps instead of the correct 22-steps. He said "I fought for the last 28 years trying to get it not done as an 18-step dance, and now with all this being presented on the Internet, I had a problem with" which is kind of like saying "I really haven't done anything productive in the last 3 decades."

In May, Silver came to an agreement with the Electric Frontier Federation (who had been representing Machulis and had filed a suit against Silver) in which the EFF would drop the lawsuit, and Silver would no longer pursue DMCA claims against anyone doing his dance improperly in a non-commercial manner. In fact, the Electric Slide is now protected under a Creative Commons license which grants full non-commercial use rights to anyone who wants to use the dance. God bless YouTube. Making the world a better place, one out-dated awkward dance move at a time.