Bullfighting might be an “art”, but it’s not copyrightable
Interestingly, a bullfighter has tried to protect as a work of authorship one of ones his moves. The torero filed an application before the Copyright Office to register a specific move of his, and although protection is not conditional upon compliance with any formality (principle of “automatic protection” of the Berne Convention signed by Spain), the purpose of the registration was to pass the filter of the Copyright Office and achieve some sort of validity (indeed, the Office does run some basic analysis regarding the legal requirements for copyright protection).
As in the “football cases” in the USA, the Copyright Office and subsequently, the Commercial Court, have turned down such pretension.
In short; a bullfighter move, and regardless of its aesthetics and style, is limited by many factors beyond the author’s intellectual creation and will; first of all, and for obvious reasons, the intervention of the bull a non-human component of the play, but also the bullfighting regulations as well as many other accidental events out of control of the “author” play an important role on the final performance of the bullfighter, despite his “original” intention on how a particular move should be performed.
Thus, the intellectual creation that the author might have in mind it’s not directly translated into a specific material expression, there’s limited choice on the torero side and is indeed rather functional indeed, the Court argued, as oppose, for example, to choreography.
However, this case is an interesting opportunity to discuss the fundamental and yet quite overlooked concept of the subject matter of copyright.
The full text here of the Court’s decision (in Spanish)