If JC released a karaoke track (instrumental only) he still needed to obtain a mechanical license from Universal Music/Mixalot (which he did). And if you’ve obtained a mechanical license and paid on it since 2005, you can’t suddenly try a fair-use argument (and there’s nothing fair-use-able about rerecording a song). What’s surprising to me is that no one has asked JC to show the copy of his mechanical license which would state, in the very first paragraph, that “your version becomes the property of Universal Music/Anthony Ray.” Before he’s painted as the victim-martyr of the internet era, shouldn’t someone establish the facts & establish what he agreed to?

What I’d like to know is, where is the outcry in the direction of Anthony Ray/Universal Music asking them to donate their license fee from GLEE to JC? That would be a make-good from the entity that actually 1) allowed JC to rerecord BGB 2) collected the license fee for the JC use on GLEE — and they morally owe this fee to JC, clearly, because it’s his version that GLEE used. If anyone were to ask Universal for a formal statement, they would side with GLEE and say that JC is not entitled to anything, as they own the copyright to his arrangement. And they could produce the actual contract that JC signed that says so, in very clear & unambiguous language. So could JC, if anyone bothered to ask him to see it. It’s not convoluted legalese, it’s verbage that says “Universal Music Publishing will own the copyright to your cover version including any changes, revisions, etc that you make.” It doesn’t get clearer than that.

The situation is a bummer, but here’s the deal: JC signed the agreement to rerecord Baby Got Back: he signed it knowingly. He’s a smart music-businessperson who knows his stuff & clearly knows what he’s doing. You can’t enter into an agreement, abide by it & become famous on it & make money on it ($500k/yr as several articles indicate) for 6 years, then suddenly decide that you don’t like the contract. JC’s name doesn’t belong on the song because JC signed a contract that assigned his version of the song to Mixalot, so it belongs to Mixalot. And it’s not about credit, it’s about collecting money, as JC seemed to acknowledge in his Twitter feed. They didn’t steal his melody or his lyrics, as he claims in one of his tweets: he assigned the copyright to those to Mixalot, then capitalized on his version of the song, became famous off of it, and used that as a springboard to let people hear his original work. For every 99-cent download of BGB that he sold, he got 70 cents from iTunes: he paid 9.1 cents of that to Mixalot, and he kept the rest. As someone who works in music publishing, it’s been frustrating to read articles from legitimate news outlets like Forbes and the WSJ that are simply echoing the “JC got ripped off” story without actually fact-checking to see if that’s the case or providing some context. Any responsible journalist should ask JC to see a copy of the contract he signed, which would put the whole thing to rest. Now JC is openly alleging that FOX stole his audio karaoke track. If that’s true and if that’s the case, then we’ll see a claim and a settlement arise from the unauthorized use of his master recording. But he has zero rights to his arrangement of “Baby Got Back” – he signed those away, as does anyone who does a cover of a copyrighted song. And the whole entire drama would stop if someone would just say, “Hey JoCo, can you post a copy of your BGB license on your webpage?” Them’s the facts.

Paul C.

For me, this isn’t about the royalties (mainly because I’m not being stolen from here), but about due credit–and how badly 17 USC 125 is written. Copyright is supposed to support innovation, not crush it, but even though Jonathan Coulton wrote a completely new song that happened to use Sir Mix-a-Lot’s lyrics, he is entitled to nothing as the law is written.

HOWEVER, there is at least one overlooked salient fact here: Coulton released a “karaoke” track separately, which only used one line (fair use, perhaps?) from “Baby Got Back,” and it seems likely that that’s what Fox pirated.

At the very least, if they could refuse to put Coulton’s name on his own work, how could they legally put anyone else’s on it but Sir Mix-a-Lot’s?

For me, this isn’t about the royalties (mainly because I’m not being stolen from here), but about due credit–and how badly 17 USC 125 is written. Copyright is supposed to support innovation, not crush it, but even though Jonathan Coulton wrote a completely new song that happened to use Sir Mix-a-Lot’s lyrics, he is entitled to nothing as the law is written.

HOWEVER, there is at least one overlooked salient fact here: Coulton released a “karaoke” track separately, which only used one line (fair use, perhaps?) from “Baby Got Back,” and it seems likely that that’s what Fox pirated.

At the very least, if they could refuse to put Coulton’s name on his own work, how could they legally put anyone else’s on it but Sir Mix-a-Lot’s?

The notoriously silent party in this equation is the writer/publisher of Baby Got Back (Universal Music & Ray Anthony) who own JC’s arrangement, who happily collected a fee for the use of the song on GLEE and who will collect 9.1 cents for every digital download of the GLEE version and the JC version. Wouldn’t it be nice of them to issue a statement saying they’ll donate their royalties for the GLEE use to JC, or to go so far as to issue JC a copyright to his own version?