Jonathan Coulton strikes back by re-releasing his own song
I think it's important to realize exactly what Fox is (regularly) doing here.<p>Fox/Glee finds a popular song.  Fox/Glee wants to do a cover.  Fox/Glee searches the internet to find a popular cover of the song.  Fox/Glee does their cover in the same style, by having musicians play/record a note-for-note re-creation of that popular cover.  Fox/Glee pays mechanical royalties to the original songwriter/publishing-company, pays absolutely nothing to the arranger that came up with the stylized cover version, and refuses to acknowledge them.<p>This is 100% legal, no matter how creative the arranger was in coming up with their cover.  If the cover artist was granted a mechanical license, the only copyright protection they were granted was to their <i>sound recording</i>.<p>This is also not the first time it has happened.  In episode 1, Glee's cover of Don't Stop Believing was practically identical to a famous a cappella arrangement (from a college a cappella group that released a cd and won some awards from it).  There was another "regionals" number that was largely identical to another similarly famous a cappella arrangement.<p>It's lousy behavior and I think they deserve every bit of blowback for being poor citizens, but it is technically legal.<p>(Big asterisk: There is reason to believe that Fox actually took Coulston's karaoke version of BGB and recorded vocals over it.  This, in contrast, <i>would</i> be a copyright infringement.)