JoCo Got Glee?

[filkertom]

Some years ago, our friend Jonathan Coulton (I love being able to put those four words together) did a magnificent cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back". The arrangement is... distinctive, especially contrasted with the original song.

Apparently, next Thursday, JoCo's exact same arrangement will show up in an episode of GleeAlso apparently

Comments

[redaxe]

I fully expect Fox to claim the copyright since it appeared in their show on their network, and then fight JoCo for royalties every time he performs it or it's aired.

Because their definition of "copyright" is "anything that can make me money, dude."

[Edited to reflect Glee's being a Fox property]

Re: Fox, actually

[filkertom]

Thanks for telling me -- fixed. And that actually makes me feel better about it; Disney is usually very scrupulous about such things, and Fox... well, Fox makes shit up as they go. I'm still astounded that The Simpsons is on there.

Re: Fox, actually

[dan_ad_nauseam]

And Disney _knows_ Coulton. They wrote The Future Soon into a Disney World act a few years back.

[his_spiffyness]

Too bad JoCo had to get national notoriety like this.

[redaxe]

There's some discussion of this over at Metafilter. On one hand, JoCo offers the song on a Noncommercial CC license; on another hand, he also mentions "2) don’t use it to make money (this does not apply to songs with material that I don’t own, like covers and mashups and remixes)." Since this is clearly a cover, Fox might decide that all they have to offer is attribution.

And on the gripping hand, someone else mentions Fox's resources for a long, drawn-out legal battle ve. JoCo's probable lack of same. I would disagree, suspecting strongly that either the community would fund his fight in part or in full, or some nerdy attorney would take the case pro bono or at severely reduced rates.

How this plays out will be interesting as a result of all that.

[dornbeast]

Also, because the tune is original, I'm wondering if that might be subject to copyright.

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf

TL, DR version: Yes, it is.

I don't know if there's an exact match in precedents, but I think the history of Ghostbusters, Down Under, and Bitter Sweet Symphony suggests that Fox is not treading on thin ice here, because the ice ran out six feet back, and they're about to do the "wild take and fall" routine that Wile E. Coyote made famous.

[kshandra]

The blog post on Monkey See is worth a read. If only for this quote:

After all, if an infinite number of monkeys in an infinite number of YouTube videos play "Somebody That I Used To Know" on an infinite number of zithers, two will sound almost exactly the same. (We know because in 2012, this pretty much happened.)

Edited for HTMfaiL