On BronyDanceParty, Glaze, and Ostereo (The "Nightmare Night" Debacle)

(Or, "Why it really, really isn't a good idea to give your unlicensed derivative work to a record label.")
(or, "for fuck's sake why does my header image keep breaking")

Most of this is basically a repost of my comments on the EQD article on this whole thing, but I think what I say bears repeating here (to anyone that bothers reading my blogs, lol)

Dogman15: What on Earth? Wasn't the original song by WoodenToaster/Glaze and Mic the Microphone (Zachary Lobertini)? If so, what the heck were they thinking agreeing to something that would screw over another fan who had made an animation of their song, an animation that I'm pretty sure was done with their permission?

Me: Doesn't matter if it was done with Glaze's permission if Glaze doesn't own the song any more. If the label contract included rights to his songs (as I'm pretty sure they all do), the company can do whatever the fuck they want and nobody can do a thing to stop them.

TexasUberAlles: I think Hasbro can probably do something to stop them, since the song is a fan work based on Hasbro IP, including the phrase "Nightmare Night."

Me: Good point, although bringing it to Hasbro's attention might cause a much more significant problem than it solves, in the form of the song itself being removed from Glaze's channel entirely for being an unauthorized derivative work, and possibly the rest of Glaze's work too if Hasbro decide they want to make an example of him. Which, quite frankly, they might, especially now that Glaze's work has been legitimized as a threat to Hasbro's IP by being signed by an official label.

It's one thing to use an even bigger fish to deal with a big fish...it's dealing with the bigger fish afterward that becomes the real problem.

I'm guessing this whole debacle is one of the reasons that brony musicians, when they get off "the ride" and get serious, don't keep their brony name--and also keep all of their existing, unlicensed derivative works up under said name, which Glaze was immeasurably stupid in doing--when they do so. It complicates things for the artist, bronies, the record company, and Hasbro, because now we're in the tricky situation where an unlicensed derivative work has been licensed...by a company that isn't the IP holder. Everyone gets burned here. Ostereo probably most of all, which I'd otherwise derive schadenfreude from if it didn't also have really bad implications for Glaze.

So, yeah, sending Hasbro after Ostereo would definitely solve the problem, but Glaze's existing works and future music career would likely get caught in the crossfire pretty severely as a result.

So uh, yeah, to be honest I really don't have a lot of sympathy for Glaze/WT here. He did a stupid thing, and more people than just him are going to reap the consequences. BronyDanceParty and Ferexes are just the beginning (the PMV and SFM PMV of the song, respectively, have both been taken down as I write this) but if things escalate, boy howdy are they gonna escalate. Probably going to be up there with Twilicorn on the scale of fandom dramas if it does come to legal blows.

I predict it looking something like this:

(In case it wasn't obvious; bronies are the Japanese people fleeing, Hasbro is Mothra, and Ostereo is Godzilla.)