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Birthday Song's Copyright Leads To a Lawsuit For the Ages
New submitter chriscappuccio sends this excerpt from the NY Times:
"The song 'Happy Birthday to You' is widely credited for being the most performed song in the world. But one of its latest venues may be the federal courthouse in Manhattan, where the only parties may be the litigants to a new legal battle. The dispute stems from a lawsuit filed on Thursday by a filmmaker in New York who is seeking to have the court declare the popular ditty to be in the public domain, and to block a music company from claiming it owns the copyright to the song and charging licensing fees for its use. The filmmaker, Jennifer Nelson, was producing a documentary movie, tentatively titled 'Happy Birthday,' about the song, the lawsuit said. In one proposed scene, the song was to be performed."
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
- Originally copyrighted in the 1930s.
...already IN the public domain! Hapi Berth Dey Two Ewe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2PCWYAZQc
They do not foster innovation, they impede it. Nor do they benefit the inventors, almost all "inventions" now go to big corporations. Who then abuse them all the more.
Very few musicians see even 10% of the $$$ their music earns.
Our present IP laws are so horrendous, society would be better without them. Sadly, politicians are so bought so we'll only see it get worse.
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And yes there are better solutions. Patents, should only be held by inventors. And should only be granted for truly novel and new inventions. Nor should a patent prevent anyone else from building a better/cheaper mousetrap. Rather, a patent should merely grant a 10% tax break to the holder or the company of their employ.
This would encourage innovation, keep inventors employed (instead of immediately being laid off by companies after their invention is complete), rather companies would put inventors on their payroll just for the tax break. And then they'd be free to stay home and continue inventing.
That is a far far better solution than our current system which is forcing companies like Google to spend $8 billion buying Motorola to defend themselves against frivolous patents granted to Apple on decades old technologies. And in most cases, not an invention but the mere patenting of a use.
This is the sad fact. The "Happy Birthday" song shouldn't even be copyrighted.
It is a derivative work on an older song in the public domain(Good Morning To You) and is far too short to receive a copyright.
In other words, imagine if you changed the ending to the alphabet song and then tried to get it copyrighted. That would be laughable, even in our modern pro-IP courts.Yet someone did exactly that decades ago, and then some company has maintained the copyright on the "Happy Birthday" song for all of these years? It is a joke. Fixing this shouldn't even be the first blow for fixing our IP problems. It should just have been challenged in court by someone by now, but the company who "owns" the song only brings it up when they know that it is a large media company who would rather just license the song than try to challenge in court.
Copyright comes into existence when a work is fixed, not when it is published. Copyright in an unpublished work lasts 70 years after the death of the author for individual works or 120 years after fixation for works made for hire.
The construction workers don't get a check from tenants every month either.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Also - copyright terminates when the author(s) die. None of this life-plus-eleventy-thousand-years crap. When you kick, your works revert into the public domain ... we *all* benefit from that.
I'd rather just a straight up term of 30 years (or whatever number is most reasonable), regardless of whether or not the author is still alive.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Whoosh. Bigtime.
Bazinga.
Thus forcing copyright owning businesses to be sole proprietorships or partnerships, moving copyright owning entities to even more narrow and hence capricious control.
This widespread, foolish animus against corporations leads to nowhere good.
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