So on the January 24th, 2013 episode of Glee they decided it would be cool to steal Jonathan Coulton's arrangement of Baby Got Back, perform it on their show, and sell it next to his on iTunes without paying, notifying, or even crediting him. They certainly don't even try to hide where they got the idea for this cover from, as in the iTunes version they use Coulton's own lyrics at places rather than Mix-A-Lot's original words, such as the blatantly obvious self-referential "Jonny C's in trouble" line. https://soundcloud.com/alacrion/joco-v-glee What's worse is that there's some evidence that the Glee producers were too lazy to even rerecord their own tracks for the cover and they just overdubbed and remastered Coulton's karaoke version. If you listen to the tracks side-by-side this seems quite plausible, but the smoking gun (or smoking duck) in this case is that Coulton uses a loud duck quack sound effect in his recording to bleep an expletive, and this quack was part of the music mix and not in the vocal track. There's some evidence that some unusual EQ was used in the Glee version of the song at that "quack" spot - the sort you'd need if you wanted to isolate and remove a sound. http://geeklikemetoo.blogspot.com/2013/01/about-that-quack.html For anyone who doesn't know who Jonathan Coulton is, he's a former codemonkey turned geek rock star who writes clever and/or humorous songs pulling from a range of nerdy topics. And he's the guy who wrote Still Alive and Want You Gone for Portal and Portal 2. Fox's response so far has been that Jonathan should simply thank them for the exposure and drop it. It's a sticky situation in terms of copyright, because I have to assume Fox's lawyers feel covered on this, but regardless of the legal implications this is morally and ethically shitty thing for them to do. And that's what you missed! GLEE!
My understanding of the copyright issues in play: If they ripped off the arrangement, they're in the clear, as I don't think derivative works under the compulsory license that covers... covers are themselves copyrightable. Any obligations the Glee people have in this respect would be to Sir-Mix-A-Lot, not to Jonathan Coulton. If they stole the recording of the karaoke version though, they're in trouble. That said, IANAL, some of this is probably incomplete or maybe just wrong.
Ingmar, you're right that from a legal standpoint they can't be sued for the arrangement under the compulsory license. Although a case could be made that the compulsory license was just a formality and the derivative work remains Jonathan's by way of fair use as it's a parody of the original work, since the changes Jonathan made in his version are substantially different enough that the compulsory license he has doesn't actually cover them anyways. And yeah, stealing his specific sound recording would be hot water for them from a legal standpoint. But at some point it's pretty clear to me that even if this turns out to be technically legal it is still unethical as all hell and basically wrong even if he doesn't have legal recourse.
Wow. Great job Glee and Fox, you pieces of shit. I did a quick google search and here is where JoCo's talking about it in his blog. And here's an excerpt that basically reiterates what's already been said in this thread but in JoCo's words. (In case you were curious.)
I don't know why the parts that are original to his version (the melody and some of the lyrics) wouldn't be copyrightable. Anyway, this pisses me right off whether or not they weasel out of any legal action. The company that ultimately owns the rights to the original version of Baby Got Back is a member of the RIAA. They write our copyright laws and sue tirelessly under them when illicit consumption is at stake, but apparently they're above following them when it comes to outright passing off someone else's work as your own and profiting from it. Sickening.
Glee vs. Jonathan Coulton? Over a shitty tweeified cover of "Baby Got Back"? No matter who wins, we lose.
It's a quirk of the license type being used: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/115 Assuming my non-lawyer understanding is correct, anyway.
I don't know, maybe one of the forum lawyers can help out, but right near the beginning: What's at issue here is precisely that Coulton's version uses an entirely different melody, which is (at minimum) what the Glee version ripped off. So it seems to me that that isn't even an appropriate license for Coulton's version to have been made under.
To make things better, the episode was also about having sex with an underage girl (after a conversation that very much confirmed that they both knew her age) to keep her from going after his younger brother. For reasons.
JoCo's high road so far - his cover of Glee's cover of his cover with proceeds going to charity. http://www.amazon.com/Baby-Got-Back-Style-Glee/dp/B00B6LRX5W
Yeah, the whole start of that I was like "Isn't she underaged?" and then they mentioned that so I was like "Oh good." and then she said "I have a fake ID." and he was like "Let's fuck!" and I was like WHAT!
I've always found Glee pretty weird when it came to discussing any issue other than anti-gay bullying, and even that they've handled hamfistedly enough that it started to annoy gay bloggers. Like their stance on teen sex seems to be 'awesome!' And earlier this season one character was bulimic. She even passed out during a performance! But nothing was ever done with it. She never had a big realization that she needed to change or that she was beautiful or whatever. They just stopped talking about it. (This is ignoring the fact that she was bulimic because she was tricked into thinking she was getting fat, which is in and of itself stupid.) And one character struggled with illiteracy. So his girlfriend, a major character on the show we are meant to like, just dumps him and starts going with another dude.
This would make a fantastic segment on the Colbert Report. It's got that mix of surreal hilarity, painful irony, and outright dickishness that would make for a great Alpha Dogs segment. Also, Jon is good friends with John Hodgeman who is friends with Jon Stewert so there's a Jon->John->Jon connection that could bring this to the spotlight. The jokes practically write themselves.
http://geeklikemetoo.blogspot.com/2013/01/crowd-sourced-forensic-audio-analysis.html And so it would seem that Glee did in fact steal Jonathan's actual karaoke track to use as their own. Whoops. Can't believe with the kind of budget they've got that they couldn't take the time to at least steal it properly and record their own tracks. It's kind of interesting teamwork on this one - one analyst noted that the bass line was in fact slightly different in spots, and another determined that's because the same center-cancelling they used to eliminate the duck quack eliminates the bass line as well, and so they would have had to re-record that particular part. Also showing how much respect they have for their fans, it appears they didn't even start off with a lossless digital copy of JoCo's song; they used the mp3, uncompressed it, added their stuff to it, and recompressed it back into another mp3. This is apparent because if they had inverted the waveform of a lossless recording the cancelling would have been perfect, but doing that with an mp3 leaves artifacts behind where the cancellation doesn't line up because the waveform is approximated rather than exact, hence the "ghost" of the quack sound that didn't cancel out perfectly.
And the Economist weighs in. You know it's good when it starts out with a phrase worthy of Lizard_King. I just eat that shit up.
