Hacker Cinema
Glee
2009 · TV series · 6 seasons
Created by Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan, Brad Falchuk
In this musical comedy, optimistic high school teacher Will Schuester tries to refuel his own passion while reinventing the high school's glee club and challenging a group of outcasts to realize their star potential as they strive to outshine their singing competition while navigating the cruel halls of McKinley High.
13 negative23 neutralfrom 36 commenters
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38 comments on Hacker News
Big media production companies care a lot about copyright, but only when it's their copyrights being threatened.
Jonathan Coulton released a cover of "Baby Got Back" with a melody he composed himself. The entire song, melody and lyrics, was appropriated without permission by Fox and performed on an episode of Glee by the cast. (I say "lyrics" because even the change of "Mix-a-Lot's in trouble" to "Jonny C's in trouble", referring to Coulton himself, was preserved in the Glee version.) When Coulton wrote a letter demanding at least acknowledgement of the original elements he contributed to the cover song, Fox insisted that their asses were covered because they paid the ASCAP fees and did not have to seek permission for, nor acknowledge, the use of a cover of a song they licensed.
If you understand laws as weapons with which the rich protect themselves from the poor, a whole lot of shit starts making sense...
Glee and Grey's Anatomy are from the OP, not my examples. Netflix is hiring the creators of these shows to make more shows, presumably somewhat similar. Breaking Bad is not from Netflix, neither is GoT which was interesting for about 1½ seasons. Even worse, Black Mirror was IMHO better before it moved to Netflix (but to some extent this is true of every show, creators have more pent-up, fresh ideas in the beginning).
While the tidal wave of capeshit is unwatchable and depressing, this is not all the competition Netflix has to contend with. First, you have every movie and tv show ever made. Then you can watch them again. Most shows can't even beat a 7th rewatch of Seinfeld.
Second, you can do something else than watching TV, like hitting the gym, writing a blog, taking your dog for a surprise extra walk, playing with your kids, making a steak instead of having takeout, cleaning your room while listening to Jordan Peterson telling you to clean your room... anything really.
And, I would argue, all of these are a better use of time than anything on Netflix right now.
There's tons of great TV shows nowadays. Mentioning Grey's anatomy and Glee does a disservice to TV.
Besides the obvious Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad there's Stranger things, Black Mirror, Westworld, just to name a few. Hell, all of the above are much much better than 90% of the crappy Marvel/superhero/blockbuster movie Hollywood keeps spewing nowadays.
This bit from the new Beauty And The Beast film sounds like Auto-Tune in a noticeable way to me: https://youtu.be/6tMoE8siNo8?t=166
I'll try to walk you through what I'm actually hearing that makes me think there's Auto-Tune there:
- 2:50: Subtle, but as the first "oh" starts, it sounds like it quickly jumps from a slightly lower note to the correct one.
- 2:58: The word "part" has a classic Auto-Tune sound. The real recording probably went slightly off pitch as the note was held and Auto-Tune has made it perfect and a little robotic.
- 3:07: "Where" has a similar sort of robotic pitch slide sound as it starts as the "oh" did earlier.
- 3:13: "Discover" has a sort of a glitch in the middle as Auto-Tune tries to track across the 'k' sound in the middle of the word.
As someone else already said, songs in TV show Glee used it all the time in a fairly obvious (but still subtle compared to intentionally sounding Auto-Tuned) way.
> I couldn't stand Glee for instance because of how auto-tuned the voices were.
This was pretty obnoxious when I noticed it; I don't mind if they use auto-tune for a one-off musical episode of a show, but for a show where every episode is a musical to use it (and not very subtly) was very off putting.
I doubt it's that clear-cut; if I'm downloading episodes of Glee or recently released movies to watch on my laptop, I'm not exactly using them for educational reasons, but I'm also not making a profit.
an analyst from the agency jokes about how, while hunting for extremists, the LEVITATION system gets clogged with information on innocuous downloads of the musical TV series Glee.
What that seems to imply is they have no interest in piracy and that it is not considered "extremist" to be a pirate... which is an interesting position for the government to take - the * AA and various other industry associations would love to have access to this data.
pcurve - responding to your question about why we "felt" that way about the name. So interestingly enough, months after he was born I recalled that my grandparents had good friends with the last name of "Quinn." I had probably only met them once or twice when I was very young, but I have to wonder if it was some kind of subliminal thing in my case. Other people have brought up the movie / song "The Mighty Quinn" - perhaps in the case of some of these trends there is just enough subtle social hints to keep certain names alive. The 2009 increase in Quinn as a female name I'm certain had to do with the TV show "Glee."Much like one of the other commenters in this thread, I felt very odd that the name we'd picked for our son, thinking it was somewhat unique or uncommon, suddenly became part of a social trend.
1) If the GPL wanted "covered work" to mean "derivative work" they would have chosen that language (the GPL is not jurisdiction specific, so they would not have included a cite to any particular statute). They chose not to, and basic rules of legal construction hold that this choice can be interpreted against that meaning.
2) You are misinterpreting the legal meaning of "based upon" which is what my post discussed.
A song in a movie does not make the movie a derivative work; it simply means the movie is distributing the song. The movie becomes a derivative work if, and only if, the movie is based upon the song, i.e., if some plot or character or some other aspect of the movie draws elements from the song. (For example, any random episode of Glee.) If the song could be replaced with another song without changing the movie, then no part of the movie is based upon the song, and the movie is not a derivative work.
"20 hours is a LONG time in Social media terms. It’s a long time in the news."
This is the most pathetic justification for piracy I've ever heard.
You couldn't wait twenty hours to watch it legally? Twenty hours? Many of which you'd probably be sleeping through anyway? That's not even a single day. You can't wait a single day?
It's like listening to a kid justify tearing open his Christmas presents on Christmas Eve.
"Wanting to watch GoT spoiler free is incredibly difficult when you have a 20 hour gap between airing in the US and airing in the UK."
Not really. I live in the States, but I TiVoed the premiere episode and watched it the next day. (The horror!) I stayed away from recap articles and had no problems avoiding spoilers.
Besides, you said earlier in the article that you had already read the books! Which means you have already pre-spoilered yourself, no? You already know every major plot twist the TV show is ever going to throw at you. The first two seasons followed the books pretty much note for note; did you think the third was going to suddenly change direction and bring in the cast of "Glee" for a big musical number?
"Basically, it means staying off Social Media and almost all “geek-news” outlets for a whole day. For some people thats easy enough, I’m not a huge social media fan/user anyway – but my JOB dictates that I check in on the different channels at least a few times each day... So I now have a choice: either don’t do my job properly and ignore my friends for a whole day, or accept that I’ll see some spoilers and my enjoyment of the show will be reduced."
That one's easy -- if your job and the scheduling of your favorite TV show conflict, your job wins. Because you're a grown-up. Right?
Right?
Well, I never would have heard his version if it weren't for this fiasco. I don't watch Glee (I enjoyed the first few episodes, i'll admit... then it just got silly).
I'm not saying it's a good thing they did this - it's not. But hey, he did a great arrangement here, and i'm happy to have heard it now.
I don't understand the law here. Fox/Glee can separate two independently copyrightable components of a work -- the lyrics and the arrangement --, then pay off the lyricist and rip off the arranger with the law being none the wiser? Why do lyrics receive preferential treatment under the law? What happens if you take two popular songs, strip the lyrics from one and combine it with the arrangement of the other? What if you add your own lyrics to someone else's arrangement: do you now own the work? What if your cover of their cover is byte-for-byte identical to their cover, that's not a copy?! Can this channel separation copyright hack be reused in other contexts (software, movies)?
I think it's important to realize exactly what Fox is (regularly) doing here.
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.
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 sound recording.
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.
It's lousy behavior and I think they deserve every bit of blowback for being poor citizens, but it is technically legal.
(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, would be a copyright infringement.)
Glee is an American musical TV show that covers a high school glee club (singing club) complete with all the teen drama of high school. They sing covers of existing songs during their musical acts. They sang Jonathan's cover of Sir Mix a Lot's "Baby Got Back" recently. Except the cover was sampled either 100% for the medley or recreated to a point of being imperceptibly similar. Jonathan was not given any attribution for this. Now Fox is selling recordings of this cover of Jonathan's cover. Does Jonathan have a claim to his cover of an already copyrighted work?
Simple recap: Sir Mix-a-lot does a song, 'Baby's Got Back' which Jonathan Coulter does a cover of. Mixalot's more techno/rap and Coulter is more of a musical arrangement. Then Glee (TV Show) does a cover using Coulter's arrangement (music and additional lyrics) and doesn't so much as acknowledge his existence, much less pay the required licensing fees.
JoCo created a cover of Sir Mix A Lot's song "Baby got back" in 2005 and paid the proper license to distribute his version.
Glee (A TV show in the US on Fox) copied his version but did not pay him any royalties.
So he has re-released his 2005 version with the title "Baby got back in the style of glee" so that people searching for the stolen copy from fox will find his as well.
Awesome response. I bought the song. I'm guessing that Fox/Glee either doesn't know how stupid this makes them look or they believe that any publicity is good publicity. Now all we need is the bear-luv inman cartoon for Adam Anders [1], the executive music producer for Glee.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2946490/
I'll come out and say it...
I used to watch Glee with my girlfriend for the first two seasons and found it quite entertaining. At least it tried to do something different than be yet another three camera laugh track sitcom.
I got tired of the stupid plotting and characters though, between the musical-chairs dating and the cheerleading coach alternating between evil bitch and nice person every other week, both I and my girlfriend just lost interest in the characters and stopped watching.
Per Coulton himself, he hasn't found any definite proof of it being used in a Glee episode so far, so it's ossible that it;s some overenthusiastic fanboy/girl.
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2013/01/18/baby-got-back-and-glee/
I can't believe someone at MS thought this was a good idea. Looks like an episode from "Glee" -- not in a good way. Catholic school girls acting like cheerleaders?
NYC and San Francisco
Spreecast, http://www.spreecast.com
Spreecast is a way to bring people together online, face to face, for conversations on topics they care about. For instance, two weeks ago we had a star from the TV show Glee talking with fans from Italy, Brazil, the UK, and the US. We are well funded, have a team of 20, and have offices in New York and San Francisco. One of the cofounders previously started StubHub and sold it to eBay.
We are bringing Spreecast to mobile and are growing a team of engineers in NYC. We are always looking for engineers on our web and infrastructure teams in San Francisco.
We're most interested in excellent engineers, regardless of which current language/toolset they're currently using. We believe that excellent engineers can quickly accomplish great things in a language that they don't already know.
If interested, please send your resume plus links to apps/websites/projects you have built to robert@spreecast.com
This link might be better:
http://blog.hulu.com/2011/12/08/from-hulu-labs-face-match/
It lists some shows that allow identifying actors by clicking on their face. I tried it with the Glee episode "Choke" and it worked for me.
As elemenohpee pointed out above, it's really a difference between creation and consumption. Always be doing.
If I need to just relax, instead of coding non-stop, instead of watching TV and melting my brain, I"ll just play guitar, or sketch, or grab the camera and go for a walk around town and see if there's anything interesting to photograph. (although I'll admit, it's much easier to do in a somewhat urban environment, that's walkable, and people are about, suburbia kills, man) Playing guitar is especially nice, cuz I can mindlessly do it for hours, and let my brain wander around while I"m just strummin out random chords. On top of all that, who has time for TV? After work there's always something goin on, Tuesdays it's the running club, Wednesday the pub 2 blocks down has $1.50 pints, Thursday is bowling league (actually more fun than you'd imagine, especially when you becomes friends with all the randos in the league.) Weeks are for travel (SKI TRIP) You gotta fill your life up to the brim, not spend it inside with the curtains drawn, and boobtube glowin! Why live vicariously though a screen, when you can do it for real. I hate watching other people have fun and build relationships, when I'm not. That's exactly what I see, and what I'm not doing, when I watch TV.
TV shows are fine every now and then, but I'm not a regular to any one show. My GF can't stay up through an entire movie (narcolepsy city), so maybe we'll watch an episode or two of Glee on Sunday night, but that's about it. I love books, and always try to read for a bit just before bed. I think that stimulates the imagination a bit more than tv though.
Now I'm not saying TV is evil, and you shouldn't watch it, I'm just putting my alternative point of view out there. To each his own.
edit: I didn't downvote you, I don't believe in doing that on disagreements, I think you bring an interesting case.
The focus of my comment was never about the morality of pirating, but rather my perceived difficulty in having an intelligent and honest conversation about it. While I did briefly touch on my thoughts about its morality, I made sure to state that matter was up for debate.
When we are talking about piracy I am amazed that people entertain the notion that the Pirate Bay is somehow liberating oppressed peoples all over the world ( as was implied in the release... ). We aren't talking about leaked government documents here, we are talking about last night's episode of Glee. All of this nonsense merely detracts and distracts for the real issue at hand.
Furthermore, I have found time and time again that people become exceedingly argumentative and obtuse when these issues are discussed, denying and arguing every claim no matter how well accepted or understood it is. I mean, can we really not agree that the Pirate Bay is primarily dedicated to distributing copyrighted material illegally? Is it really necessary for me to dig up a source and provide a citation for that claim?
In direct response to your question, I would not be distressed by such a site, nor does the existence of the pirate bay cause me distress. What might irritate me about such a site however is if it were to claim that jaywalking laws were not in place to control traffic and provide safe crossing to pedestrians, but instead to oppress the people of a city or some other nonsense along the same lines. It would irritate me if its supporters some deep conviction for it and when questioned about their beliefs, immediately assume those unlike them derive their morality from law.
I pirate content a lot. I am a member of a private tracker, and for awhile I rented out a seedbox to maintain my ratio. Never once though, have I ever felt entitled to the things I downloaded. Never once did I try to justify my downloading with anything other than the fact that it is super convenient and free. Why you think I'm so dull as to never question the word of law is beyond me. I never once said anything to suggest legality is equivalent to morality. I may even go so far as to say this conclusion you've made is indicative to the very thing I'm speaking of. I mean, it takes some rather large assumptions to reach that conclusion based upon my comments.
Is there a way to report broken links?
http://www.curvio.com/glee/season-3/episode-10/yes-no/quinn-fabray/seafoam-sweater/582
Clicking the sweater would normally take me to an online store I assume, but on this page it leads to a 403 on the J. Crew images server.
Forgive me if I am a bit put off by the spectacle of a bunch of people calling themselves heroes for downloading the latest episode of "Glee".
By the way, those hits from North Korea? Those aren't exactly coming from the average man on the street.
> So the Pirate Bay is now a bastion of freedom that lets users in Syria and North Korea download the latest episode of Glee?
- difference leads to unknown
- unknown leads to fear
- fear leads to hate
This is the most basic, irrational reflex process from which emerges racism, and wars, and lots of purposeless suffering.
Previously we were segregated by geography, long distances, creating islands of culture bound by the propagation times of information. We shattered that barrier. The Internet is the first place in the world since the birth of humanity where there can be a generation of people sharing the same culture all around the world. The fact that Iranians want to watch Glee may sound trivial, but I see it as a sign that people around the world want to unite.
We should be able to watch shows, listen to music or access whatever medium by which culture transits from the other side of the world. I'm not condoning piracy but from artificial limitations like DVD zoning, digital distribution restrictions creating segregated stores (like iTunes Store) or Internet borderizing laws like SOPA really do not help at bringing people together.
tl;dr: global culture sharing prevents wars.
So the Pirate Bay is now a bastion of freedom that lets users in Syria and North Korea download the latest episode of Glee? (The current most popular torrent there). I'm a little confused about what their greater noble political purpose is.
To me it sounds like a place where you can get your TV shows in a more convenient way than waiting until they appear on channels you have, or download that movie you can't be bothered to pay $10-$20 to see.
How about real civil disobedience? Have TBP require to put in your full name and picture and the reason why are you downloading the full Microsoft Office package. Put that full list on the front page on TBP, let the government see the tens thousands of people who refuse to follow the unjust copyright laws and are ready to go to prison for breaking them. Now you're making a statement.
Or alternatively, produce your own independent content. Supposedly with today's technology it's easy and cheap. Wouldn't it be an amazing blow against this evil "MAFIAA" to one year from now go to TBP home page and see how the most downloaded file is not the latest Hollywood $250 million movie, but an independently produced short? If every user who tweeted against SOPA/ACTA would now tweet about that cool CC-licensed book/game/movie they just saw?
http://list-of-glee-episodes.blogspot.com/p/glee.html
That's incredibly cool, but I think Gruber's point about the problems of third party integration will prove to be crucial.
Me: "Set my facebook status to getting ready to ride the roller coaster at Six Flags."
Siri: ...
Me: "Are there any headlines about my startup on the front page of Hacker News?"
Siri: ...
Me: "What Kindle books do I have on HTML 5?"
Siri: ...
Me: "Play me the latest episode of Glee on Netflix."
Siri: ...
Some of these, like Facebook, could be handled by smart first-party integration by Apple. But in general, any time a new use case comes along, first party integration is going to lag way behind, if it's implemented at all.
I don't mean to rag on Siri -- it's an incredibly cool technology even today, and it apparently works amazingly well. But the more things you can do by picking up the phone and using the touch interfsce that you simply can't do at all with the voice interface, the less I think it will slot right into people's lives and become how they interface with their phone.
>>Fox's president of affiliate sales Mike Hopkins told the Wall Street Journal. "If this works, you're going to see a lot more content online."
And if this doesn't work, you're going to see a lot more content online. These companies just don't get it. It has less to do with money, and more to do with ease of viewing. If I want to watch Family Guy or Glee the day after it airs, I will google "family guy episodes online free" and find plenty of free options. Or I will go to torrent sites. Fox just lost me as a customer. I gladly watch the shows legally on Hulu when that's the easiest way.
> Those who enjoy Fox shows such as Family Guy, Glee, or The Simpsons will soon have to wait an extra eight days if they want to watch new episodes online
Oh, no, not a whole eight days! I'll literally be a full week behind the latest pop culture phenomenae!
What do you think Cisco imagines networking equipment sold to oppressive governments is going to be used for?
Edit: Jeeze borism, I mention Cisco because they are the ones with ads playing between Glee episodes. No, I’m sure they aren’t the “only ones.”
I am currently paying for Hulu Plus and can't figure out whether it's worth it or not. Things that bother me are (1) commercials despite me paying, (2) the fact that I can't reliably play the videos on my Ubuntu boxes since they use Flash, (3) lack of content from certain networks (e.g.: Survivor is only available on cbs.com, not on Hulu which makes it kind of useless to try to build a media center PC around Hulu), (4) all the silly clips of shows they have: I am trying to watch full episodes and think that clips are for YouTube, and finally (5) the fact that since I started paying they pulled a bunch of content (e.g.: first season of Glee, first season of Modern Family, etc.) despite the premise that you pay for that content being available.
On one hand I'm still actively using their service. On the other, I am trying to figure out the most effective way to tell them that I am not satisfied with it. Canceling will lose them $120/year which is measly. Anybody got any ideas of how to make an impact on what they do?
Alternatively, does anyone know of (legal) alternatives to Hulu? I have no problem with paying for a good service, just can't find someone to give my money to.
I don't know if that's true. The bitrate of a low-end Blu Ray movie is about 15 Mbps. I bought Glee in "HD" on iTunes, and that has a bitrate of about 150 kbps. So we're talking a 100x jump in bitrate.
Bandwidth would be a big problem. But storage is an even bigger problem. And if you trade away storage requirements for higher bandwidth consumption, you have even more bandwidth problems and people are going to be pissed they can't watch their movie on the plane.
Now, you could argue that there's no perceptual difference between X kbps and Y Mbps, but I have seen articles that differ with you on that if that's the position you choose to take. Is there possibly some happy middle ground in there somewhere? For sure. I don't think removable media is going away soon though.
You're missing the point, but it would actually make a pretty good episode. Here's my attempt:
* RIAA baddies turn up in suits demand money * Glee club hasn't got the money * Will asks for money from Sues budget. Obviously she says no way. She needs to save for the hovercraft. * They decide that Glee club can no longer sing copyrighted music * Your task for the week? "Original song". Compose an original song. * They all do cool funky new tracks * Turns out the RIAA guys were listening, and have a change of heart they work out some deal or something. Maybe the original songs are *so* hot that the RIAA want in on profits. * Yay! all is good.
They can then sprinkle in as many of the issues and arguments about copyright as they see fit/are allowed to.
Huh? It's talking about glee clubs, and in particular the glee club on Glee, who mostly do live performances. The article begins, "For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned." But this premise seems to be faulty - there's no indication that there is a million dollars worth of law-breaking involved in performing songs live as part of a glee club which is most likely covered by the absurdly cheap school/town ASCAP, BMI etc license.
Certainly I haven't heard of them talking about releasing a recording on Glee, although I missed a couple episodes...
EDIT: I see that the article discusses in particular the videos that were created which would constitute "recordings". On the mashup issue, presumably they aren't actually recording mashups but writing them to be performed live - these aren't lip syncing groups, and most glee clubs probably don't make videos either so it seems fairly moot.
A strong break needs to be made between the reality of life and that of television shows.
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.
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.
For actual high school performances and their rights, I will reference jbarciauskas's comment.