Glee is an American musical TV show that covers a high school glee club (singing club) complete with all the teen drama of high school. They sing covers of existing songs during their musical acts. They sang Jonathan's cover of Sir Mix a Lot's "Baby Got Back" recently. Except the cover was sampled either 100% for the medley or recreated to a point of being imperceptibly similar. Jonathan was not given any attribution for this. Now Fox is selling recordings of this cover of Jonathan's cover. Does Jonathan have a claim to his cover of an already copyrighted work?
They've definitely overstepped the line on it. Next time they're thinking about taking down material on copyright grounds they might want to reflect on this case.
It is perhaps worth noting that the reason why this can happen is that the group of people running Glee and the people handling copyright takedowns are two completely different sets of people. Unless this event catalyzes communication between those two groups, you can expect to continue to see inconsistencies in policy enforcement like this.
There's an implicit assumption here that consistent behaviour within a corporation matters. I think this is wrong. Corporations' interests are served perfectly well by them behaving inconsistently whenever it suits their interests. There may well be executives in Fox who know about the inconsistencies here who simply don't care, because it doesn't affect the bottom line.
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Glee is an American musical TV show that covers a high school glee club (singing club) complete with all the teen drama of high school. They sing covers of existing songs during their musical acts. They sang Jonathan's cover of Sir Mix a Lot's "Baby Got Back" recently. Except the cover was sampled either 100% for the medley or recreated to a point of being imperceptibly similar. Jonathan was not given any attribution for this. Now Fox is selling recordings of this cover of Jonathan's cover. Does Jonathan have a claim to his cover of an already copyrighted work?
To be entirely accurate, Glee now covers High School and College. This particular song was sung at NYADA ( New York Academy of Dramatic Arts).
They've definitely overstepped the line on it. Next time they're thinking about taking down material on copyright grounds they might want to reflect on this case.
It is perhaps worth noting that the reason why this can happen is that the group of people running Glee and the people handling copyright takedowns are two completely different sets of people. Unless this event catalyzes communication between those two groups, you can expect to continue to see inconsistencies in policy enforcement like this.
There's an implicit assumption here that consistent behaviour within a corporation matters. I think this is wrong. Corporations' interests are served perfectly well by them behaving inconsistently whenever it suits their interests. There may well be executives in Fox who know about the inconsistencies here who simply don't care, because it doesn't affect the bottom line.
This isn't the first time Glee's done it either.
https://twitter.com/richardcheese/status/292725851068440577