Glee is the Answer When Questions Are Wrong: That Glee Thing

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  • @BrettGlass they also think that downvoting relevant articles in /r/JoCo on Reddit will help too (though that could be a disgruntled Glee fan).
  • I'm trying (to no avail, so far) to convince myself to stop reading comments about this story, because they've settled down into a few predictable categories:

    1. "You are awesome!"
    2. "You should do [thing that has already been discussed at length]"
    3. "You are entirely responsible for the actions of your fans, and since some fans are being mean, you are a jerk and a cult leader. Also, nobody owes you anything because [thing that has been refuted at length.]"
    4. Relevant information I could easily find in this thread. d:
  • edited February 2013
    I haven't stopped reading about this, because as an occasional song writer and parodist (who would love to do these things full time if he did not have another career and a half right now) I am very interested in its implications for artists' rights.

    I am also working on a detailed, fairly sophisticated quantitative analysis of whether Glee used JoCo's backing track. (I'm doing this part time as a background task, but will devote more time to it if JoCo indicates to me that he would like to see final results before the cruise.)

    The most interesting thing about this affair is that just about everyone seems to feel, in their guts, that the law is wrong in its handling of particularly creative covers of existing works -- even if they are not parodies, as I believe JoCo's version to be, and even if there are no issues regarding master use rights. (See Paul Sabourin's message about all of this in the "JoCo in the Media" thread.) This may warrant a revision of the statute.
  • I'm doing this part time as a background task, but will devote more time to it if JoCo indicates to me that he would like to see final results before the cruise.

    That does not seem likely, given that he says he does not want us to do any more work for free.
  • edited February 2013
    I read that. But he might be curious about what the results will be (as I am!), or might want someone he hired to duplicate my methods. So the offer stands, just in case.
  • Yeah, I understand wanting to do it out of curiosity. (But no need to spend most of the cruise in your stateroom working on stuff for him. ;)
  • Nope; I'm doing it for me and for the community, and also as a favor to JoCo if he's interested.
  • edited February 2013
    Brett, I'm definitely curious to see what you find out. I'm curious exactly what the producers did. I don't think the question of whether they used his recording is really an open question anymore. But I'm curious as to whether my theory of what they did is correct and if even their exact edits could be reconstructed. It's something I might try to do if I had a lot of free time, mostly because I like learning how to get better at using my tools like Logic, but I'd say only do it if it scratches a personal itch at this point.
  • My temporal analysis won't reveal processing such as center-canceling, but ought to reveal splice points where they cut and pasted.
  • edited February 2013
    I just had a JoCo song stuck in my head, which is quite normal... but now this is what my brain does with them:

    Edit:  Couldn't help myself but complete the chorus.

    You will be ripped off by Glee
    Though it may take some time, I know eventually
    You will be ripped off by Glee
    I use your MP3 to show how clever I'll be
    When I rip off you
    You will know it's true
    That you've never been ripped off 'til you've been ripped off by Glee
  • edited February 2013
    Isn't there some truth in the things the comment guy on Forbes is saying? I recall somebody else also explaining how a mechanical license doesn't really allow you to create deriative works, that differ substantially from the original...

    Don't get me wrong, I really love JoCo and want him to get all the recognition he deserves, I just don't want him to get an even more bitter aftertaste of the whole issue...

    ...though Sir Mix-a-Lot didn't seem to mind the cover at all; however, you never know how the record company people will behave when there is a probable financial gain involved.
  • edited February 2013
    In real life, parodists often get mechanical licenses for their parodies. This is for two reasons. Firstly, it gives some compensation to the person who provided fodder for the parody, which many people think is deserved even if you could claim "fair use" and not pay. Secondly, it's insurance. The legal definition of a parody is vague, so if a court says, "That's not a parody," or "That's not different enough from what it parodies," you've given the artist the compensation that's due for a cover.

    The law says that if your work is purely derivative -- that is, if you publish a cover that makes virtually no changes to the original --  you have no rights. But what if you create something to "go along with" part or all of someone else's original work? Is that work permissible to publish, and is it protected separately? The famous "Sing Along With Mad" case, in which Mad Magazine was sued for printing alternative lyrics for popular tunes, suggests that it is. In that case, the court ruled that Mad's lyrics could be published without compensation to the authors of the songs to which they were to be sung, and were separately copyrightable. (A lower court made exceptions for two instances where, it said, Mad used too many of the same words. But the higher one reversed it and said they were all permissible.)

    If JoCo writes a tune to go along with Sir Mix-A-Lot's rap (rap is, essentially, a form of "beat poetry" with no melody at all, so there's no issue of similarity to an existing tune), is the tune separately copyrightable? If you go by that case, the answer ought to be "yes." Does it have to be parody to qualify? Unclear, but even if so, I think that JoCo has a good case, because setting the words of a brash, crude rap to a mellow soft rock tune is a subtle act of high parody.
  • edited February 2013
    I'm glad I'm not the only one that can't stop reading the comments! I keep wanting some sort resolution to this mess, some word from Fox or someone. I'm hoping that the lack of the promised "more to come" means that things are in the works. Things involving lawyers.

    @Spektugalo, I think what that commenter on the Forbes story is missing, along with most of the people criticizing Jonathan here, is that he wasn't after money. In the original post he said he wasn't sure about what rights he had, and the money from the cover of the cover of the cover is all going to charity. And yeah, I bet he wishes he had used a different licensing structure. Regardless of copyrights and licensing, it was a slimy move of Fox to do what they did. Not to speak for Jonathan, but I really do think that had Fox given him a call and mentioned him in the credits, we would have gotten a blog post and a few tweets about his cover being on Glee. Nothing more. He would have gotten the exposure without the outrage. 

    Either way, he (probably) wasn't going to get the money. Well, had Glee not used his recording, anyway. . . 


  • "The commenter" on Forbes smells a hell of a lot like a FOX lawyer trying to counter some of the bad publicity. My historian senses are tingling whenever I read what he writes - this dude's bias is far too powerfully Counter-Coulton to be a disinterested party.
  • *snort* I read that as 'disinterested panty', and I'm blaming Paul and Storm. (Nice parody, @sandman!)
  • Disinterested Panty is the name of my Tom Jones cover-band.
  • @Brett: Ah, thanks a lot for the info!

    @maletero: Yes, It totally agree with you.

    I agree, the commenter seems to be providing valid information, but at the same time he seems to turn things as if JoCo was going for money only.

    But here's what I don't really understand:
    So Jonathan did use a mechanical license, but in there it says ' that any such arrangement shall not change the basic melody or the fundamental character of the Composition(s)', but his arrangement does change the basic melody. All the forbes comment guy is saying refers to the mechanical license;
    however, according to that 'does not change the basic melody', doesn't it mean that it
    wouldn't actually be applicable for JoCo's version?

    However, are there any copyright laws that protect an original arrangement by itself as in 'intellectual property' (eg. in this case Jonathan's arrangement for Baby got Back)?

    Be warned, my knowledge about copyright and licenses is just hearsay from the past two weeks, so I'm just trying to understand all this stuff :)
  • edited February 2013

    I hope more artists wronged by Glee will be able to step forward, now that JoCo's story is spreading. 

    Addendum: I've noticed the JoCo/Glee story spreading in regular news sites (which is fantastic), but not as many music sites as I hoped.
  • Longtime fan and first time poster, but in the spirit of OJ's totally fictional and not at all based in reality "If I Did It", I wrote up a quick "what if..." over at my blog. Don't want to drop the entire thing here because I think that writing books for your first post in a community is patently uncool.

    Also obsessed with this thread...
  • This weeks Star Wars: Clone Wars starts off "Morality separates heroes from Villains" and I couldn't help but think of the corrupt Fox empire......
  • @BrettGlass Thanks for the link, great interview, JoCo explained the situation well.
  • So last night I was explaining the whole thing to a friend who does professional mixing/mastering.

    I was all "and the big question now is whether Fox used Coulton's source tracks, because they are essentially identical, the banjo player makes the same mistakes, if you play them simultaneously they line up perfectly, and even if Fox hired a banjo player how could the musician play the exact same notes in the exact same way?"

    And he told me there were session musicians specifically hired to copy performances.

    Like, that's how they made all of the backing tracks for Guitar Hero, Rock Band, etc. They hired people to create sound-alikes.

    So... that. Wanted to share.
  • But that's when they want to make an album of popular songs they can sell cheaply (such as the 100-track soundalike album I accidentally bought when I wanted the real Never Gonna Give You Up for nefarious purposes); they want it to sound as much like the original as possible. Why would they want this song to sound like JoCo's down to the mistakes? They're betting on their audience not having heard JoCo's version and therefore not caring how close to it the Glee version sounds.
  • See?  JoCo should just shut up and smile, because look at the positive exposure this has brought him!

    Oh, Huffington Post didn't give him any credit at all?  Who could have seen that coming?  Argh. 
  • Heh.  Did anyone watch last night's (Jan 5) episode of The Good Wife?
  • Thanks, @kate; that's really interesting!
  • Thanks Kate! How did you stumble across this? It's definitely the first paper about a law provision that I've ever been interested in reading.
  • edited May 2014
    The cure they propose isn't much better than the disease. It has vague language that could let the original author, motivated by money from a third party, make bogus claims of damage to reputation and cancel the compulsory license. The result of this, if it had happened in the Glee fiasco, would have been even worse than what actually happened; JoCo would have had to pull his own track down and stop selling it.
     
    IMHO, JoCo should have stated outright that his work was an act of parody. He would have had many more rights under a claim of fair use than under any compulsory mechanical license.
  • Thanks, @kate! That's an excellent analysis. I hope somebody (in power) reads it and takes action.
  • Happy to share, @Angelastic, @Madeleine and @srdownie! :)
  • Sir Mix-a-Lot comments:

    How does he feel about Glee stealing Jonathan Coulton's cover of "Baby Got Back" without giving him credit?

    Jonathan Coulton's cover of the song: You know, it's funny, I remember watching that and being real hesitant to comment on it. I love Jonathan's cover, and what happened is when Glee stole it, I loved the way he torched them! He gave it away for free and trumped it. So even though they covered the cover, I think he ended up winning in the end.
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