Glee, losers and copyright

Thanks to Rock Band and Glee, I can say that when it comes to musical taste, my kids and I have quite a lot in common, with one big exception: I never could stomach Madonna. But on Journey, there are no two opinions in my family.

Glee is a pretty entertaining TV series, popular with young people, where the heroes are the kids of the Glee Club, a bunch of losers, hence the L on the forehead, who have the guts to sing and make it as a choir.

Along the way the show takes on issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse. But there is one issue Glee dodges: copyright, as Christina Mulligan points out.

In one episode of Glee the club sets out to make a copy of Madonna’s Vogue video(*). The problem is that the penalty for doing that is 150,000 dollars. Mulligan keeps the examples coming: in another episode a character (Sue) posts her own version of Olivia Newton-John’s Physical on the internet. If that happened in the real world, Sue would have to pay 300,000 dollars in damages to the American recording industry. For every mashup the Glee characters put together, they should be paying 150,000 dollars a pop.

But the show doesn’t show any of that. Glee teaches that remixing or covering famous songs is a good and legitimate thing to do, and that nobody is going to give you any trouble over it.

You may think I’m exaggerating, but in the United States teenagers do get pursued for doing exactly what they see on Glee. For example, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) asked the American camping association, Girl Scouts included, to pay royalties in order to sing copyrighted songs at their camps!

It is routine for copyright holders to take down YouTube videos that show teenagers dancing to pop songs.

There is a tension, and a contradiction, in this series that has nothing to do with the series itself. The problem, as Doctorow says in his comment on Mulligan’s article, is that the industry sends a contradictory message: “do as I say, not as I do”. On one hand, the very same people who produce this show, which promotes fair use and remixing, accuse those who copy of being thieves.

It’s almost as if they were telling us: “kids, watch on TV how lovely it is to mash up, cover and copy songs, because you can’t do it yourselves, losers!”

(*) the link to this video, provided by Christina Mulligan, can’t be viewed in Chile, due to copyright protection.