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I could care less about the show Glee… high school teens singing blitheness-like covers of famous pop tunes kinda makes my stomach ill… but when they blatantly not just rip off, but use the actual audio from from geeky songwriter Jonathan Coulton’s recording of ‘Baby got back’,it really grinds my gear.

Hey look, @gleeonfox ripped off my cover of Baby Got Back: bit.ly/WME9Ho. Never even contacted me. Classy.

— Jonathan Coulton (@jonathancoulton) January 18, 2013

If you don’t remember Coulton, maybe his classic video game anthem from the game Portal (Still Alive) will refresh your memory.

Unbelievable? listen to both versions the instrumentation and phrasing is all identical and in even in the same key.

Jonathan Coulton’s Version:

Glee’s Version:

A complicating factor is that, to my ears, it sounds like it actually uses the audio from my recording – not the vocals obviously, but the instruments sound EXTREMELY similar. And I could swear I hear the duck quack somewhere in the background there, though it’s hard to say if that’s just my ears expecting it.

But wait, before you go calling Coulton a hypocrite, because it is after all a cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s song, he did buy the statutory license to distribute his version of this song.

Glee’s version, which will be in the eleventh episode of season four, “Sadie Hawkins,” and will air next week on the 24th, unless Coulton and his legal team can put a stop to it, or maybe even send him a few bucks for his troubles.

[Cheers kotaku]