Yeah, obviously I'm not "in the know" regarding what steps Fox might have skipped. I just know that:
a) If a song is published (and BGB was) then anyone has the right to cover it (a compulsory license always exists)
b) If someone covers it, the covering artist gets no copyright of the musical material - all that is retained by the song copyright owner(s). (This makes intuitive sense, as it otherwise would restrict the ability of other artists to create more covers of the song. You'd have to make sure that your arrangement choices didn't conflict with ANY other arrangements out there.)
c) The covering artist does have copyright over the sound recording of the arrangement.
Now, if techie people wanted to get involved in a way they could actually affect things, rather than just theorizing about what someone's actions/motivations might have been, there's opportunity here:
Coulton released a karaoke track of his version of BGB. It's released by-nc-sa. It's considered likely that Fox used this karaoke track as the backing track for their version. If so, they have infringed on all three portions of the license (no attribution, they're selling it, they didn't release it share-alike).
So - I don't know how to do this, but it seems like someone could do a statistical analysis of the karaoke track, and Fox's version, and prove within some statistical likeliness that Fox used the karaoke track and did not simply re-record their own instruments. (Note that it WOULD be legal for Fox to re-record Coulton's arrangement note-for-note since it would no longer be using Coulton's sound recording.)
Comments
Yeah, obviously I'm not "in the know" regarding what steps Fox might have skipped. I just know that:
a) If a song is published (and BGB was) then anyone has the right to cover it (a compulsory license always exists)
b) If someone covers it, the covering artist gets no copyright of the musical material - all that is retained by the song copyright owner(s). (This makes intuitive sense, as it otherwise would restrict the ability of other artists to create more covers of the song. You'd have to make sure that your arrangement choices didn't conflict with ANY other arrangements out there.)
c) The covering artist does have copyright over the sound recording of the arrangement.
Now, if techie people wanted to get involved in a way they could actually affect things, rather than just theorizing about what someone's actions/motivations might have been, there's opportunity here:
Coulton released a karaoke track of his version of BGB. It's released by-nc-sa. It's considered likely that Fox used this karaoke track as the backing track for their version. If so, they have infringed on all three portions of the license (no attribution, they're selling it, they didn't release it share-alike).
So - I don't know how to do this, but it seems like someone could do a statistical analysis of the karaoke track, and Fox's version, and prove within some statistical likeliness that Fox used the karaoke track and did not simply re-record their own instruments. (Note that it WOULD be legal for Fox to re-record Coulton's arrangement note-for-note since it would no longer be using Coulton's sound recording.)