Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club

You have to remember that Glee is backed by the RIAA, they make money off of the show so I doubt they will cover an issue that makes them look like the bad guys.

The article refers to the characters copyright infringement, not the show itself (which i'm guessing goes through proper copyright procedure)

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.

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.