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Jonathan Coulton Song Used By Glee Without Permission
FunPika writes "Jonathan Coulton, who is known for songs such as "Code Monkey", is claiming that his cover of "Baby Got Back" was used without permission on Glee, a television show aired by Fox Broadcasting Company. When the Glee version appeared on YouTube last week, Coulton suspected that it sounded similar to his cover, and several of his fans confirmed this by analyzing the two tracks. Despite Coulton contacting Fox, they continued with airing the episode and have placed the song on sale in iTunes."
What, did anyone think that copyright was intended to protect anyone except the rich and powerful?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
interesting to see how a joe average gets smacked down like a gnat with a buick on youtube, but then we see the exact opposite here? Or didn't they file a takedown notice?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/18/3891836/glee-uses-jonathan-coultons-cover-of-baby-got-back-without-permission
There's no protection for a cover. However, the Glee people weren't nice because they didn't credit him for his ultra-boring cover of a great song.
specifically, the license Jonathan Coulton uses, allows for noncommercial use. Anyone want to argue that this is non-commercial use?
I don't really see how the melody he wrote for the song is not covered though, that isn't a copy of the original song at all. A song is not solely composed of lyrics.
Yes, he did a cover. However, he did a specific arrangement of the song that the show took as their own. From the opening chorus to the way the guitar is played, it's the same arrangement of Baby Got Back. I have a feeling that the music arranger for the show might be let go for getting credit where credit wasn't due.
We aren't talking about someone doing a 'similar' cover, we are talking about Fox, by all appearances, using his Karaoke track verbatim against his license and singing over it. Hell, even the lyrics kept "Johnny C's in trouble" instead of the original lyrics. Analysis suggests they even had to work a bit to try to edit out a duck quack from his track, but still left some sign of that quack behind.
In fact, reports are that the show lifts a *lot* of differently done arrangements of well known songs done by obscure people without permission without a shred of apologetic tone or credit given.
But at least it is equal opportunity, a fair number of more well known musicians whose songs have been featured aren't exactly pleased to hear their works crop up in that show either.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
A show with a reported 3.5 million dollar an episode budget can't even be arsed to let artists know their stuff is going to be used....
All of these people being stolen from would be content with so little as an off-screen credit through some blog post or something. If they wanted to be decent human beings, they would have thrown in an on-screen one liner mentioning the names of the people that are actually responsible for the arrangements, rather than trying to perpetuate the lie that the people behind that show have even an ounce of original musical talent.
All this stuff they could have done without spending so much as a dime...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Listen to the Soundcloud link I posted. Use headphones. This is not a hyper-accurate note-for-note cover. If it were that, there would be all sorts of stereo phasing wildness going on in your ears, because they would be all confused by the Haas effect. That is not going on because the instrumentals are the same instrumental.
http://s9.postimage.org/qq104s1zh/joco_glee_comparison.gif
Here is a spectrogram comparison I made from the first 15 seconds of each song, starting from the attack of the second 'clap' sample. They're not identical obviously, owing to different mastering and compression on the tracks, in addition to the differing vocal performances going on over top. But, the spectral components they share in common are clear. If you look at that clap sample by itself, before the vocals and other instrumentation start up, they are obviously the same sample.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
This was a triumph.
You could at least have used the first post to point out that this is the artist who wrote and performed "Still Alive" from the video game Portal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI
Not sure how this wasn't in TFS.
They stole Greg Laswell's arrangement of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" about a year ago.
http://www.pleasewelcomeyourjudges.com/2011/11/greg-laswell-not-glee-ful-about.html
Perhaps because Coulton was noted on Slashdot long before he wrote songs for Valve.
Look, even though I think the song is shit, the cover is shit, the show is shit, and all the people that were involved in shitting all over each other just because they cant be bothered to acknowledge each others shitty efforts are shitty people, I still give shit about this shit because its all right for fox to rip people off when they have trucks of money already, but it's not all right the other way around? Just bullshit.
I hope that clears things up?
Jonathan Coulton is a member of the geek community with honors. He's given to us often, and freely.
I hope someone with lawyer skills steps up to help pay back the debt. Let me know where I can donate.
The Glee version shows characteristic loss of data above 16k -- this was ripped from an mp3 or other lossy format at some point.
There is (or was) a YouTube artist who called herself Venetian Princess who took recordings of songs and sang her own parody lyrics over the top of them. (For those keeping track, when Weird Al does a parody, he records his own version of the music, thereby avoiding this problem.) Unfortunately for her, that's infringement, of precisely the type Fox has committed. She got crushed like a bug. Her videos were yanked off of YouTube and the lawyers ate her face.
So.... we're waiting. We can expect every Glee episode to be yanked for alleged infringement now, right?
Right? ...
*crickets*
A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
That would be $150 000 per infringement times 6 million viewers, but it might just be per track not per downloaded copy. That single mom had to pay ~$35 000 per track, and it mention that people settle at $3 500 per track.
More awkwardly for Fox, the Glee version uses Jonathan Coulton's revised lyrics. Listen at 2:16 (of the Glee version) to hear the line "Johnny C's in trouble". I don't know if they owe him money, but certainly a nod in his direction wouldn't have been a bad thing. I don't watch this High School Glee Factor Musical shite, so maybe someone with impaired tastes could tell us whether or not there's any kind of credit to him?
-- Using the preview button since 2005
OK so that's me replying to myself twice in a row -- bad form, I know.
But after the last post I remembered stuff I'd read about the development of the record industry in the states. Basically, in the old days there wasn't really any such thing as a "cover", because hardly anyone wrote their own stuff, and everyone was recording exactly the same thing anyway. But "derivative works" were recognised as separate works in law, and record labels started working that to their advantage. They would get their artists to change one or two notes and words and claim it was a new "derivative work". This didn't get them any more money at this stage, because they were still bound by the licensing agreement they recorded under.
The goal, rather, was to become the canonical "standard" that the public wanted to hear. Say your song came with the line "baby baby ooo-ah" and you changed it to "baby baby ooo-ee" -- no-one else could record the "ooo-ee" version without your permission. Now the cost to the recording artist doesn't change, so there was no incentive to people coming after to go to the "original" when then slightly modified version was available for the same amount of money and was likely to get more sales. However, suddenly the original author gets half of what he got before, all for two words and two notes that don't really constitute an artistic change to the song.
So they changed the law to kill the practice, by requiring you to get specific permission before creating a substantially different version: a derivative work.
A well-intentioned law, then, but nothing comes without consequences.
In reality, Coulton's license to cover the song is invalid: he clearly changed the song drastically, so it is a derivative work -- that whole tune is hardly an incidental change. But there's no way Mix-A-Lot is going to legally challenge him on it, because he's just gained a truckload of cash by licensing out Coulton's tune -- far more than he'd get for suing Coulton for breaking the conditions of his license.
So the system's broken, because it's allowing people to create these derivative works against the law. Perhaps Coulton should be suing the Harry Fox agency for selling him the wrong license...?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The in-game version was sung by Ellen McLain, but JoCo sang on the Portal Soundtrack. Here's one of his versions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxNmeMklFk8