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 Glee.

Also apparently, they didn't ask JoCo. (Scroll down in comments; a number of online news sources have picked up on the story, including Wired, Wonkette, and the Onion AV Club.)

Obviously, JoCo doesn't own the song -- but he does own the arrangement, and that ownership is subject to protection by copyright. If it were, oh, I don't know, me doing JoCo's version, and selling it for download or putting it on a CD, I'd, y'know, ask first, because JoCo's version has been in the wild for several years and it's pretty well known in geek circles, and because it's The Thing To Do. At the absolute minimum, I'd mention the guy.

This is going on frickin' Glee. Worldwide TV. CDs. DVDs. Karaoke games. It'd be nice to make sure the guy who came up with that arrangement and melody got some notoriety from it.

Not to mention cash. This is Fox, after all.

Comments

[murphys_lawyer]

When I was watching it, I remember Glee showcased Madonna's songs in one episode, with no background information about how important it is to get permission for re-creating them or publicly broadcasting them, as they did over the school's tannoy (otherwise she'd have sued Fox into next Tuesday). Obviously Madonna gave them permission, so it's not as if Fox didn't know they should be doing something in that field. But, you know, little people will be so grateful for the publicity and we can just cut them a small cheque...

I'm not Mr. Coulter, and will probably never create anything as fun as he's done; but I'd like to think that if someone decided to misappropriate anything of mine and try to make money from it I'd have the guts to just tell them no rather than accept retroactive payment.