Slashdot Mirror
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."
I've copyrighted the phrase "fuck all the lawyers", so you need to send me a check if you want to use it.
Right? /sarcasm
I'm glad someone is pushing this topic (finally) and this is the perfect example. It's one thing to protect artists but the never-ending copyright extensions doing nothing of the sort. They ensure the media companies can generate recurring profits but, by and large, provide limit benefit to those actually responsible for the work. Oh wait...corporations are people now too.
Hopefully this is decided firmly, not on some silly technicality, and sets a precedent for other cases so common-use media can be pushed into public domain. Maybe someone will rule that copyright law is unfair, unconstitutional, or similar and FORCE our government to review this and move to a more rational policy.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
"By the way, today happens to be my birthday."
Bring back the original copyright terms:
The original length of copyright in the United States was 14 years, and it had to be explicitly applied for. If the author wished, he could apply for a second 14year monopoly grant, but after that the work entered the public domain, so it could be used and built upon by others.
How about "25 years without any extension, then it goes into the public domain". What these money-hungry Hollywood and publishing executives don't seem to realize is that everything DRM'ed will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
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Constitutionally, copyright is meant to be for a limited time. What we have today hardly reflects the constitutional intent behind allowing the concept, originally used in other countries as a form of censorship, in the fledgling States.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
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.
Slashdot might not be RockPaperShotgun in terms of title puns, but every once in a while you get a good one off.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
This was covered on NPR back in early March. Way to step up to the plate, old media.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
We've got a new birthday song! So there!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaiusnHOF9A
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Welcome to the Machine.
Come with me. On behalf of Pink Floyd's publishers, we have matters to discuss.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Just sing something else: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2PCWYAZQc
...already IN the public domain! Hapi Berth Dey Two Ewe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2f2PCWYAZQc
This seems to be an interesting example of a court case being fought for the publicity it generates. It's surely cheaper to file this suit than to advertise his film in conventional ways. However unlike cases such as SCO v. IBM, the litigant probably believes he would win the case if it came to trial. The newsworthiness of the suit lies in the audacity of the defendants in aggressively asserting the copyright in the first place.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Happy happy birthday from the Chili's crew, we wish it was our birthday so we could party too. HEY!
Carraba's:
Tanti auguri a te
Tanti auguri a te
Tanti auguri a te from Carraba's
Tanti auguri a te.
Bennigan's:
Happy Happy Birthday
On your special Day
Happy Happy Birthday
That's why we're here to say
Happy Happy Birthday
May all your dreams come true
Happy Happy Birthday
From Bennigans to you!
All Chotchkie's waiters are required to wear at least 15 pieces of flair.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Oh, man. Welcome to the Jungle.
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However, to get copyright on a work that is not plain readable (i.e. encrypted or compiled), the plain readable version MUST be available. Either by having the actual source code submitted to the copyright office of your home country (or designated other signatory to Berne) or the decrypt key to the same.
They are getting over their digital fear, actually. There are about ready to allow access to their catalog on Spotify. Wish You Were Here is available on Spotify already and when it hits 1 mil streams the whole catalog gets released.
For she's a jolly good fellow,
For she's a jolly good fellow,
For she's a jolly good fellow,
And so say all of us!
No great loss "Tears in the rain" wasn't that greater song I'm not even 100% if it charted ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_the_Rain_(song)
the song is over a hundred fucking years old. its practically an american standard and so ubiquitously used as to be unenforceable. in any other country a judge would laugh the plaintiff out of the god damn room. if it doesnt go public domain we can definitely start a campaign against it. banthebirthdaysong.com or nomorebirthdaysong.org should point to a creative-commons or public-domain version of a song that anything from a synthesizer to a ten year old can sing without having to hire johnny cochran.
Good people go to bed earlier.
... Which is why they're gonna rule in favour Warner, because screw the public. They aren't a corporation. What business do they have owning things that can be owned privately and exploited by individuals. Individuals meaning individual corporations: The real people.
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
In 2008 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion against copyright holders after failure to enforce trademarks for more than 40 years.
The defendant Thomas Kenneth Abraham for years was a producer of decorative fraternity and sorority paddles. In 1990 thirty-two fraternities and sororities commenced contacting Abraham asking his to pay a license to use certain house names and logos. The defendant asseted a "laches defense" which is when a copyright holder falls asleep which regard to their trademark enforcement as he had already been creating the paddles for 30+ years. In 2008 the plantiffs sued and and were declined monetary relief after failing to enforce their copyrights for so long. They were however awarded an injunction against further use by Abraham, which of course doesn't line the attorneys pockets.
How long have people been singing Happy Birthday? How many people even knew there was an "author"? I would have assumed it was a 'traditional' and hence public domain.
Certainly there has been no enforcement of copyright over the years, and I'm guessing latches would apply.
This sort of thing is why copyright should only last for 10 year (or less). No extensions. No nothing. 10 (or less) years. If you can't profit in that amount of time, that's life.
Sort of, the tune itself is public domain, but the words aren't. The public domain words, IIRC, are the ones for "What day is today?" Pretty much as sung by Elzar on Futurama.
What really pisses me off is that even a public domain work these days is subject to being "reclaimed" into copyright, if there is money to be made. Just look at "It's a Wonderful Life." No one would have even remembered that movie if it hadn't fell into the public domain and became popular to air around Christmas (since anyone could do it). But when someone realized it was actually making money and had became popular again, of course some corporation immediately sweeps in and reclaims copyright on it. Now it only airs once or twice a year on NBC and no one gives a shit.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
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.
***
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.
When I violated Guns-n-Roses' copyrights, Axl Rose not only sued me, he threw me out of Guns-n-Roses. I never even knew I was *in* Guns-n-Roses!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
The Supreme Court of the United States has recognized corporate personhood since at least 1819. By 1886, the justices were unanimous that at least the equal protection provision of the Fourteenth Amendment applies to the associations of individuals called "corporations" as much as it does to the individuals severally.
Then don't include life of the author in the equation at all. Give individual works the same copyright term as works made for hire.
Welcome to My Nightmare.
oooops...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Copyrights are supposed to encourage the creator to create more work. As soon as the creator is dead, the chances of her/him creating more work are somewhat diminished.
Post-mortem copyrights are supposed to encourage the author's estate to complete the author's unfinished works rather than shredding them. With no post-mortem copyright, Christopher Tolkien might not have allowed The Silmarillion to see publication.
The maintainers of Upton Sinclair's estate would like to have a few words with you.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
We don't require construction workers to tear down their house every 5 years if they built it themselves
Nor do we give construction workers a recurring royalty for continuing to live in a house that they built.
What's more, the risk involved with releasing a new movie or album is sufficient that you'd never pay back the risk for such a short copyright term.
I thought movies made most of their money during the box office and initial home video and premium video on demand releases. Do long tail royalties decades out really outweigh those, especially if a work isn't made available to the public at all? What sort of royalties have the film Song of the South and the TV series Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea been earning lately?
Looking at Wikipedia page it indicates the song is from 1893 (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You). How the heck can anyone claim copyright on it at this point? Sure the last of the two artists died in 1946, meaning it is currently death+67 years, but I still think it is way overboard and agree with it finally needing to be put into the public domain.
I think we need to revise copyright such that the copyright after death is much shorter, but add a notion of attribution in each place for after its expiration.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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.
With every possible name inserted into line 3?
Have gnu, will travel.
The real tragedy of the commons is, that they don't have a defender. Corporations have been stealing from the public domain in massive quantities and for a long time.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Terms could still be scaled back without withdrawing from any worldwide treaty. Berne requires life plus 50 years for individual works or 50 years for works made for hire. The United States currently goes above and beyond this by recognizing life plus 70 years for individual works or 95 years for works made for hire.
A finished house is instantly worth money while creative endeavours are often not. Maybe for big corporations there are instant profits to be made but a band or artist that spends 10+ years developing a following and perfecting their artform will often be working for nothing in the hope that eventually it will all pay off. Copyright is abused by Big Media but Copyright is also the only thing that stops Big Media from exploiting independent artists.
no one gives a shit becasue its out of fashion. What you seem to fail to realize is that it's still on the air.
I mean, yeah reclaim copyrights are crap for a number of reasons, but people loosing interest with an available work isn't one of them.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I understand it wasn't so much digital fear but fear of their (later) music, which was meant to be heard in its entirety, being cut into singles and sold that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I don't think the length of copyright impedes creativity at all. Once something is in the public domain it's free to use in whole unchanged. Where's the creativity in that?
It's overly restrictive fair use rules that impede creativity. Allow a copyright holder to own their property perpetually should be fine, but loosen fair use laws so that things can be used and built upon.
1. Copyright your entire DNA pattern
2. Impregnate many women, yes this is the ??????? for most Slashdot readers.
3. Sue them for unlawful derivative works of copyrighted material.
Not sure if that is unlawful dissemination or insemination.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
To my mind the problem is the "corporations are people" mantra is only trotted out when it's legally convenient, and is promptly ignored when personhood would be inconvenient. Basically they get all the benefits of being a legal person, with none of the downsides.
So just as an idea, what if we we also classify corporations as something they are much more similar to? Another institution explicitly created for the concentration and leveraging of power (wealth being one form of power). Governments. Let the default assumption be that corporations have to comply with all regulations and constitutional limits imposed on the governments of the jurisdictions that they do business in. Cleary that might require some fragmentation - Google China and Google US would be subject to some fairly incompatible regulations, but that might be for the best. Do we really want to live in a world where corporate power rivals or exceeds that of many/most governments? (Democratic) governments are at least titullarly under the control of their populations, but I realy don't see global cooperation reaching the point where governments can effectively reign in the power of international mega-corporations any time soon, and even if the cooperation existed there doesn't seem to be the will. Not surprising since corporations (and the powerful people controlling them) are themselves largely responsible for selecting and empowering the candidates that the rest of us get to choose between.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The simple concept of Doublespeak explains very clearly what a government means when it says: Promote innovation through intellectual property law. Our governments mean to stifle, not promote. Copyright should not extend more than 20 years past the life of the original author. Public domain should be growing every year. Instead it's stuck to protect Disney.
That's what I'd heard as well. Whole thing's all kinds of nuts. On one hand, hi, I'm the radio.. Floyd's albums have been cut into singles for quite some time now and that's OK. On the other hand, when people buy their music, listen to the albums.. it's a different experience than just one song, they really did construct a whole album and not just a collection of songs one following another and it would be a real shame for someone to miss out on that.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
The members of the association own the association.
Employees typically are not the owners of the corporation. They are members of the association but by definition only shareholders are the owners. Employees can be shareholders but frequently are not.
Then if a member performs an illegal act, is not the association also performing the same illegal act?
An excellent question. If the association (a corporations) has the rights of a person should it not also have the responsibilities of one?
...on the issue of the song's copyright. The law, under the Sonny Bono extension act, has already been upheld by the Supreme Court, so the lower court only need look at the publisher's claim and call it.
HOWEVER, if the whole point of her film is to point out the ridiculousness of all of this, she's got a very strong claim for 'Fair Use', since the work is being addressed in a critical commentary.
(crud, I meant to post that as me and not as anonymous...stupid new machine with no cookies...)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Every time this suggestion comes up, I repeat that I don't want the law to create more incentives for homicide.
Easily solved. If the individual dies of anything other than natural causes the work immediately become public domain at the time of their death.
Post-mortem copyrights are supposed to encourage the author's estate to complete the author's unfinished works rather than shredding them.
Then I would suggest that those exist only if explicitly provided for in the will of the author. Perhaps JRR Tolkien did not want the Silmarilion published. If the author wants their works to be continued they can transfer the copyright prior to or upon their death. I see no reason for this to be an automatic process. As it stands we often have estates sitting on works that rightfully should be in the public domain where they can be worked on by people other than the estate of the author. Tolkien's children are no more deserving than you are as far as being able to create derivative works of a deceased author.
In any case 50 years after the author is dead is an ABSURD amount of time for someone to benefit from someone elses work. There is no reasonable argument I can think of for post-mortem copyrights to last that long.
The members of the association own the association.
But they don't, do they? At least not for publicly traded companies.
It matters not. Employees of a corporation aren't necessarily shareholders, just as employees of a partnership aren't necessarily partners, and just as it's possible for a sole proprietorship to hire employees.
Postmortem of death + N years is to allow companies to contract with a copyright holder without fear that the idiot stepping in front of a bus ends the copyright tomorrow.
A flat term of 14 years after first publication, renewable once if the work is still in print at the end of the first term, would have the same effect.
There is no reasonable argument I can think of for post-mortem copyrights to last that long.
Other than that a country's trading partners happen to have made a business decision to erect trade barriers against countries that use reason. Most favored nation status often requires WTO membership, and WTO requires TRIPS, and TRIPS requires Berne, and Berne requires life + 50.
Other than that a country's trading partners happen to have made a business decision to erect trade barriers against countries that use reason.
That's not a reasonable argument. That is merely a statement of the status quo. So my original statement stands. I have never seen a reasonable argument for why post-mortem copyrights should last as long as they do.
Indeed. Like any IP right, copyright is a deal between society and the creator. In the end, the work will be public domain. But with DRM the copyright holder does not seem to want to stick to his end of the deal. And changes in technology will well mean that the work will be unreadable by the time the copyright expires.
Bert
Corporations and people are apples and oranges, despite what the supreme court says. If you cannot see the difference, then I'd suggest you have some sort of cognitive impairment. For example, do corporations ever grow old? Fall in love? To they need parents the wipe their bums? Do they feel anything? Do corporations need health insurance, or want to have children? Do they need maternity leave? Do they ever sleep?
/people/.
Corporations are made out of people and laws, and the legal structure shapes the incentive structures of the people within them. If you confuse corporations with people, you are bound to endorse laws that encourage bad incentive structures to the behaviour of
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It's the very existence of copyright law that is going to win the day here and restore Happy Birthday to the public domain. The lawsuit rests precisely on proving that the music publisher doesn't in fact hold a valid copyright.
Also, may I point out that copyright law also underlays ALL open source licenses, and it's strength as a legal principle in both theory and practice is what has kept Linux and its kin rolling along, winning every court challenge it faces.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I would use this as the music under the title: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrYhWVMqf-4
I'd much rather pay royalties to Stravinsky's estate than to the publishing company.
The gravest nautical threat to the US since Admiral Yamamoto.
Exactly. And then the copyright trolls were born. Researching old lyrics, poems, pictures, graphics or whatever. Copyrighting them and then going after anyone who uses them.
I really don't have a problem if the copyright could be reclaimed by the family either. That is, if it's done before the original runs out. I don't have a problem with mickey mouse or whatever since the company is still using it and still being creative with it.
It's really a problem to me that if they STOP using it and the copyright runs out then any pond scum can come along and claim it as their own.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
Wouldn't a documentary about the "Happy Birthday" song which only has a single scene in which the song was sung, fall under fair use laws?
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
otherwise you could simply get a bunch of investors bound together by contract law
I believe that's called a partnership. As I understand it, there's a sliding scale of sorts from the general partnership that you describe through limited partnership (LP), limited liability partnerships (LLC/LLP), and S corporations to C corporations.
You could argue that "The Corporation" is defined by it's executives and board members
The corporation as I see it is defined by its investors through the board that it elects. This board appoints (hires) executives who appoint other employees.
Even if they have near-total control of the company when they choose to exert it, that isn't substantially different from the slave owner who says "do what I tell you, when I tell you, and otherwise keep doing your normal duties.
Yes it is. Employees can quit.
One of the functions of a corporation is to separate some of the aspects of management (control) from ownership.
What you are referring to is the protection of the owners of the company from personal liability (in most cases) for the actions of the company. That's the basic reason for a corporation to exist and it is super important. It's not an exaggeration to say that it is the basis for our entire economy. However as it is structured it often eliminates too much accountability. Management can direct the company to engage in activities that would put them in jail were they to engage in those same activities without the protection of the corporate veil. If I as an individual drop poison in a river and harm someone, I am going to jail. If an individual does so under the aegis of a corporation, chances are that they won't even see the inside of a courtroom.
The corporate veil is an important legal protection and I support it strongly. However I also believe that if an individual engages in activities which would be criminal outside of the corporation, then their liability shield should be subject to possible revocation much more easily than it is presently. While I understand why, it floors me that after the financial meltdown of 2008 or after the BP oil spill that essentially no one has been tried in a court of law despite there being ample evidence of malfeasance.
The Supreme Court ruling of corporate personhood is quite limited.
No limited enough unfortunately. Corporations are allowed to behave quite badly compared with natural persons.
Corporations and people are apples and oranges, despite what the supreme court says.
This article is about law, and the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of law in Dice's home country. Were you referring to changing the law?
For example, do corporations ever grow old? Fall in love? To they need parents the wipe their bums?
Corporations are not born and do not have a physical body to speak of, but they are "persons". In fact, "person" itself has come to be a legal construct, including both individuals and the associations that they form. Not all "persons" are human beings under current law, and not all human beings are even "persons" since Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
If you confuse corporations with people, you are bound to endorse laws that encourage bad incentive structures to the behaviour of /people/.
I agree with you that some rights should apply only to individuals, and not to corporations. I'm just arguing that the term "person" has a specific meaning under current law.
Everyone gets initial copyright term of say 10 years. After that, it can be extended by 1 year if the copyright holder pays a fee of $100. To extend it for another year, the fee increases to $200, then $400, $800, etc.
The intent is to give everyone a limited copyright protection. Then, if the copyrighted work is truly valuable, the copyright holder can extend the term by paying a fee. But, the fee increases exponentially every year. The exponential increase in the copyright extension fees reflects the cost to society to extend this monopoly. At some point, extending it will no longer be profitable.
The net result is that all the "abandonware" enters public domain quickly, but authors can still milk truly valuable works -- for a while.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
And all his sequestered kin.
I suggest an alternate ending:
So say we all!
My comment specifically says X years
Then I realize that I must have misread it, and we end up in agreement. With that out of the way:
All copyright term lengths should be the same.
Should this be true of, say, a computer program and a painting?
Wait, what? As a true geek, you should only listen to GNUs n' RMSes.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Where did you get an outrageous number like 80 from? How about something sensible like 0-5 years, depending on the subject? Retroactive, of course. I think that's still a pretty long duration (5 years! That's practically an eternity!), but it would be a nice first step.
It is a bit scary that copyright keeps being extended without any empirical evidence to show that society would benefit from longer copyright. As far as I know, very little research has been done on the optimal duration of copyright. One paper I've found, which appears to be one of the most ambitious ones on this topic, still makes several unrealistic assumptions such as "Works are only produced for monetary gain", "No income is possible from works not covered by copyright", "Enforcing copyright has no cost" and "It does not get harder to produce new works when the public domain gets smaller", which all bias it towards longer copyright. Despite this, it finds an optimal duration of *15 years*, with your suggested 80 years being very strongly disfavored.
What exactly did you base your 80 years suggestion on?
PS. Hopefully this won't show up two times - this is my second time trying to submit it, but I had a connection problem the first time.
why should a corporation get special tax laws?
So that corporate income tax and capital gains tax add up to an approximation of individual income tax.
Imagine you wrote a song, filmed a short video or created this amazing illustration and 5 years later it was used by corporations to sell everything from toothpaste to cars. How would you feel about that?
Fucking fantastic.
I would never have to worry about finding work as an artist again. I might have to worry about working again but so it goes.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Dan: What’s the problem?
Mallory: During your broadcast on September 5th, you sang Happy Birthday to your partner, Casey McCall.
Dan: Yeah, but I can explain that. Wait, it was his birthday. Why do I have to explain that?
Mallory: You sang Happy Birthday on the air.
Mallory: Listen, I think it’s sweet that you and your partner sing to each other on television. Others may think that it’s vaguely gay, but I disagree.
Dan: Thank you.
Mallory: Nonetheless, you can’t do it anymore.
Dan: Why not?
Mallory: It’s against the law?
Dan: It’s against the law to be vaguely gay?
Mallory: It’s against the law to sing Happy Birthday on television.
Dan: Why?
Mallory: It's owned by the representatives of Mildred and Patty Hill.
Dan: It took two people to write that song?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.