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Birthday Song's Copyright Leads To a Lawsuit For the Ages

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-many-more dept.

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."

4 of 442 comments (clear)

  1. But it's... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...already IN the public domain! Hapi Berth Dey Two Ewe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2PCWYAZQc

  2. It shouldn't even be copyrighted by PuckSR · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Protecting the arts and artists by mooingyak · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  4. Re:Protecting the arts and artists by Dr.+Sheldon+Cooper · · Score: 5, Informative

    Whoosh. Bigtime.

    --
    Bazinga.