Visitors to MTV’s new online music video site can listen to songs with plenty of crass and vulgar lyrics, but may be surprised to find that certain other language had once been deemed too nasty for broadcast  that is, the names of the file-sharing sites Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire and Kazaa, all of which have been the bane of the music industry.

The foul-mouthed musician swept up by MTV’s speech code is Weird Al Yankovic, whose lyrics to “Don’t Download This Song,” a tongue-in-cheek complaint about file-sharing first released in 2006 included those so-called offensive terms. (Since then, two of those sites  Grokster and Morpheus  have become inactive.)

Image Recording artist Weird Al Yankovic in June. Credit... Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

In an e-mail message on Sunday, Mr. Yankovic wrote that he had bleeped out the names to the file-sharing sites in his song two years ago, after MTV “told me that they would refuse to air my video” otherwise. “Instead of subtly removing or obscuring the words in the track,” he wrote, “I made the creative decision to bleep them out as obnoxiously as possible, so that there would be no mistake I was being censored.”