As a show that’s whole premise revolves around doing covers of songs, you would think that they would be a little more careful about how they go about their business. For example, they may want to ask first before they use content from songwriters.
“Glee”, the hit television show about high school teenagers dealing with the pressures of growing up by singing their hearts out, does not typically rely on new material for their show but instead covers songs from all genre’s and decades. However, in next week’s episode, “Glee” has blatantly ripped off an arrangement from geeky songwriter Jonathon Coulton. Who is that? I didn’t know either, but he is best known for his video game anthem “Still Alive” from the game Portal, and he was not too happy to learn that one of his arrangements was stolen by the show…without even asking him first.
“Hey look, @GLEEonFOX ripped off my cover of Baby Got Back: bit.ly/WME9Ho. Never even contacted me. Classy.” Coulton tweeted yesterday morning.
If you take a look at Coulton’s version of the song and compare it to “Glee’s” you can see that they are pretty much identical.
So as you can see, Coulton has a point here. It is not like they just borrowed a few guitar strums or phrasing choices from the song – the two are identical. Coulton went on his Twitter again to say “After listening, I think that @GLEEonFOX may have even used parts of my recording. Do I hear a duck quack? And of course they say "Johnny C".”
The “Glee” version of the track is no longer for sale on iTunes, having been pulled by FOX, but it can still be found on the Swedish iTunes store.
