Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club

There's always been a folk culture, including folk songs -- with "folk" and "songs" as separate words, "songs part of the popular consciousness" as opposed to "songs sung in an Appalachian dialect with a banjo, a long beard, and highly un-Appalachian politics."<p>We have a folk culture at the present day, too; the problem is that all songs used by the folk are copyrighted. Read _Sound Targets_, on music in the Iraq War, for another illustration of this; if every occasion of piracy mentioned in that book produced a $150,000 fine, the RIAA could field its own armed forces with the proceeds. (I hope I didn't just give them an idea.)<p>I'm not sure where we go from here. This situation can't continue, but "the laborer is worthy of his hire," to use the medieval form of the expression. If only the music industry weren't a gang of thugs (for a list of RIAA members: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RIAA_member_labels" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RIAA_member_labels</a>), we might already have a solution for this...

I'm sympathetic to the argument in this article, but like virtually all such articles it misses the underlying problem. Copyright law isn't the way it is because of misguided lawmakers or greedy corporations, or, rather, those are only the proximate causes. The ultimate cause is that representative government is unstable against the formation of special interest groups. Explaining very clearly to people why they're a bad idea, and even convincing them that you're right, won't solve the fundamental problem. The Mickey Mouse Protection Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed for the same basic reasons that ethanol and mohair subsidies persist: those who benefit have a concentrated interest to game the system; those who suffer have a greatly diluted interest to resist.<p>By the way, you may be aware that the infamous mohair subsidies ended in 1995. Alas, this was not the equilibrium, and you can see the grinding of the implacable gears in this sad story:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohair#US_subsidies_for_mohair_production" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohair#US_subsidies_for_mohair_...</a>

High school teachers know about this stuff. A drama teacher I know always knows exactly how many tickets she needs to sell to break even after licensing.

Things are about to get a lot worse with ACTA. Imagine you Internet access being shut off for sharing an unauthorized, amateur remake or mashup like those disccussed in the article!

You have to remember that Glee is backed by the RIAA, they make money off of the show so I doubt they will cover an issue that makes them look like the bad guys.

Ehm, I think most schools have agreements with ASCAP and BMI that cover this scenario... perhaps through something like this: <a href="http://www.ascap.com/licensing/pdfs/imla_rate_schedule.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.ascap.com/licensing/pdfs/imla_rate_schedule.pdf</a>

<i>So you tell me — what promotes knowledge and learning: letting people rearrange music and learn to use a video camera, or threatening new artists with $150,000 fines?</i><p>Since this is a relatively cheap rhetorical question, let's play devil's advocate: 1) forcing people to make new content is obviously good in the way of promoting learning; 2) you can learn technique without using protected content 3) there are already some exceptions in place for educational and religious use of protected content (right now if you do "Like a Virgin" as an allegory of being born again as a Christian, do it in the Church hall, and don't make any money, you should be okay).<p>The exceptions are probably too few and too narrow. A more useful discussion would explain how they should be broadened.

I have a feeling that printing, filling out, and then mailing off a mechanical license for every song, and then waiting by the mailbox for the results won't make for compelling television.<p>I understand the message behind the weblog post, but I think it's asking a little too much for them to tackle copyright on Glee.

Here's another instance of the article (Yale Law School's Information Society Project site) with a few comments that might be worth reading if you're especially interested in this topic:<p><a href="http://yaleisp.org/2010/06/copyright-and-glee/" rel="nofollow">http://yaleisp.org/2010/06/copyright-and-glee/</a>

A strong break needs to be made between the reality of life and that of television shows.<p>In the reality of Glee the RIAA may not exist, copyright laws could be drastically different. Given that a sixteen year old looks and sounds like he is in his mid-twenties this is entirely conceivable. We would also all have amazing hair and teeth.<p>If we pull this into our reality, then I would believe that the production company Fox owns the rights to the songs being sung, or has enough influence over the owning bodies to use them without concern.<p>For actual high school performances and their rights, I will reference jbarciauskas's comment.