Geek Songwriter Jonathan Coulton and last night's Glee

[Patrick Sponaugle]

Diggers,

Although the FOX television show Glee isn't really in the Sci Fi Dig
genre wheelhouse, something recently happened that touched on Internet
Fame, Geek Culture, and TV, and I felt it would be a relevant topic
for the group.

This morning, my twitter feed was aflame with righteous geek
indignation, which I then joined in on. There's this indie musician
name Jonathan Coulton who has achieved a certain amount of Internet
fame by posting a song a week online for a few years, then selling the
collections and touring. I've seen him in concert a few times, bought
some of his albums, etc.

I'm a big fan of his song "Re: Your Brains" which is a song about
inter-office negotiations during a Zombie Apocalypse, between a zombie
and his former co-workers who are barricaded up and just won't listen
to his business plan involving their gray matter and his appetite.

"Code Monkey" is also quite a personal favorite of mine.

So what does this have to do with Nerd Rage? Well, a few years ago,
Coulton recorded a distinctive cover of Sir Mix-a-lot's rap song Baby
Got Back, (a song about Sir Mix-a-lot's love of women with large
bottoms.) Coulton took the rude and largely misogynistic rap song and
wrote an amusing, sensitive, charming, romantic-sounding song using
the same lyrics. (Mostly the same... he replaced the phrase
"Mix-a-lot's in trouble" with "Johnny C's in trouble in one spot)

Last week, it was discovered that the Fox television show Glee had
recorded an episode that was going to feature a cover of Sir
Mix-a-lot's Baby Got Back. The song was available early in iTunes, and
the song was identical to Coulton's cover (other than the vocals,
which were the Glee cast.) It was unclear if the instrumentals in the
Glee song were either an amazing duplication of Coulton's, or were his
actual tracks. The changes he made to the lyrics were faithfully
reproduced in the Glee version.

Last night, the episode aired, with no mention of credit to JoCo, and
the Internet (or at least a portion of it) raged.

I am not a lawyer, so I'll probably get some of this wrong...

JoCo (as he is occasionally referred as) secured rights to create his
cover of Mix-a-Lot's rap song, and released his song freely under a
Creative Commons license which I believe specifies non-commercial use
of his work and that he be attributed. Fox violated both restrictions
by putting the song up on iTunes and not crediting Coulton.

Anyway, I find the story interesting, and since I'm (clearly) a
Jonathan Coulton fan (his song "I Crush Everything" about a sad and
lonely giant squid does not fail to pull an emotional reaction from
me) I felt like
sharing...

If anyone is interested in more detail (or more importantly, fact
checking my claims) just google "Glee Rips Off Baby Got Back" and you
should find NPR, Wired, CNET, Kotaku, Reddit, etc. articles on the
topic.

At the very least, you can hear both versions of the Baby Got Back
cover, which is an awesome song.

If you've never heard of Jonathan Coulton, I highly recommend hearing
some of his stuff.

Best regards to all,

Pat from Maryland

[Nuchtchas]

I woke up to this story too, I didn't know the show aired yet.  I listened to both versions, they are very similar, I didn't listen long enough to hear the Johnny C though, that was in the show?

I would not be surprised if it all went something like this

Music arranger: Hey I heard this song on youtube, it's fun, music lackeys, let's get this on the show.

Lackeys: sure, we'll take your word as literal truth, we will replicate it exactly.

Show writers and runner hear the idea: "We love that, let's do it."

No one asked where the idea came from, and the person who heard it on youtube didn't think about having to credit it.  Much like every other person who takes an image from online (Recently Redbook did this with a bunch of DiY blogs, they had an artist redraw actual pictures from DIYs and Pinterest, and didn't credit the original posters) which is a violation of copyright (rule of thumb is, unless it says you have the right to you us it, you don't) and stealing ideas which is morally crappy.

-
Nuchtchas/Nutty

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[Patrick Sponaugle]

On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Nuchtchas <Nuch...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I woke up to this story too, I didn't know the show aired yet. I listened
> to both versions, they are very similar, I didn't listen long enough to hear
> the Johnny C though, that was in the show?
>

The audio I heard last week had the "Johnny C's in trouble" line, I
can't confirm if it was aired or not. One of those details I'm
interested in hearing about.

Pat