The Dance Is the Intellectual Property

By DaMarko GianCarlo

We used to think the asset was the song.

The master recording. The publishing. The thing you could press onto vinyl, stream through a platform, or sync into a scene. Ownership felt clean because the product was fixed. You could point to it. Contract it. License it. Control it.

But culture hasn’t been behaving that way.

It’s been moving.

And now that movement is colliding with a system that was never built to contain it.

When Darrin Henson filed suit over the use of NSYNC’s choreography in Deadpool & Wolverine, it didn’t read like a niche dispute about credit. It read like a structural error surfacing. Because the claim isn’t just that a dance was used without permission. The claim is that the dance itself is a separate piece of intellectual property—distinct from the song, distinct from the video, distinct from the system that distributed it.

If that holds, then an entire layer of culture has been misclassified for decades.

We’ve been here before—just not with bodies.

Early film studios controlled cameras, distribution, and theaters. The assumption was simple: control the system, control the output. Actors, directors, even writers were treated as components. It took years of legal pressure for authorship to separate from infrastructure.

Music followed. The split between master and publishing rights forced the industry to admit that what you hear and what you wrote are not the same asset.

This is the next fracture.

What you see performed—the choreography—is not automatically owned by the entity that financed or distributed the recording of it.

And that matters now because choreography no longer lives inside a single container.

Bye Bye Bye was built for a fixed, broadcast era. But its value was never the video. It was the repeatability of the movement. The precision. The silhouette. The fact that you can recognize it instantly—even without the music.

That’s what allowed it to survive.

That’s what allowed it to travel.

By the time that choreography appears again—on a film set, inside a game engine, across a social feed—it is no longer background to a song. It is a signal. A piece of cultural shorthand that carries recognition on its own.

And recognition is what gets monetized.

When Sony Music licenses a track, it licenses sound. But when a production recreates choreography, it accesses memory—muscle memory, collective memory, the part of culture that lives in the body, not the file.

The system has treated those as inseparable.

They aren’t.

Most of the most recognizable choreography in pop culture has never been priced as intellectual property.

That is the gap.

Because distribution has shifted from playback to participation. Platforms didn’t just accelerate music—they accelerated movement. A dance can now circulate independently of its origin, replicated at scale by people who were never part of the initial production.

So the question the industry has avoided becomes unavoidable:

If the movement propagates independently, ownership of the original container becomes incomplete.

This is where the lawsuit stops being about a film and becomes about infrastructure.

Because what’s being contested is whether choreography is:

A component of a larger work
or
A standalone asset that can be owned, licensed, and protected independently

If it’s the latter, the implications extend immediately.

Studios don’t just clear music—they clear movement.
Game developers don’t just license likeness—they license choreography.
Brands don’t just reference culture—they negotiate with it.

And creators who built the movements that shaped eras gain a claim over how those movements are reused.

This isn’t a failure of one company. It’s the system operating exactly as it was designed—optimizing for what could be captured, not what could be repeated.

But culture has moved to repetition.

The industry adapted to streaming.
It adapted to digital distribution.
It adapted to algorithmic recommendation.

It has not adapted to the idea that the smallest unit of culture—the gesture—can carry the most value.

Deadpool doesn’t need the full track to activate recognition. It needs the movement. The rhythm of the body. The sequence the audience already knows before the music resolves.

That’s what triggers the response.

That’s what travels.

That’s what sticks.

Which means the asset is no longer just what you hear.

It’s what you can repeat.

And repetition is where value compounds.

If Henson’s argument lands, it won’t just be a win for one choreographer. It will formalize what the culture has already decided: movement is not decoration. It is authorship.

And authorship, once recognized, demands structure.

Publishing rights forced the industry to account for writers.
Likeness rights are forcing Hollywood to account for digital replication.

Choreography becomes the next rights layer—sitting between performance and recording, between body and distribution.

Once that layer exists, it has to be priced, negotiated, and protected.

Which means the next time culture travels, the question won’t be who owns the song.

It will be who owns the thing everyone remembers.

Because the system can no longer ignore the obvious.

The recording was never the only product.

The body was.

And now the body is starting to invoice.