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"Happy Birthday" Public Domain After All?
New submitter jazzdude00021 writes: No song has had as contentious of copyright history as "Happy Birthday." The song is nearly ubiquitous at birthday parties in the USA, and even has several translations with the same tune. Due to copyrights held by Warner Music, public performances have historically commanded royalty fees. However, a new lawsuit has been brought to prove that "Happy Birthday" is, and always has been, in the public domain.The discovery phase for this lawsuit ended on July, 11 2014, yet this past week new evidence surfaced from Warner Music that may substantiate the claim that the lyrics were in the public domain long before the copyright laws changed in 1927.
Remember what they say... Any news article that ends in a question mark is false.
Disney defends "Steamboat Willie" from about the same time frame to protect Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain. "Happy Birthday" is from about the same time. This era is kept out of the public domain by repeated copyright law changes, the most recent being the DMCA which extended the time works stay copyrighted.
I'm guessing Time Warner is going to be giving all those royalties back?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That's the probem with copyright long after the creator is dead. You can't get them to testify under oath and so bogus copyrights like this are inevitable.
Here Warner had evidence that the lyrics predated their claim from other sources, and and the music they never made a clim on, so what they did was claim copyright on the lyrics based a piano arangement.
They would have known their claim was false because so many claims have been made about this copyright they would have examined it to protect their multi-million investment, so they likely acted to deceive.
Read about this like 5 days ago. Anything else you guys want to present as "news". Perhaps the death of Jimmy Hendrix or that new Godfather II movie?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
"long before the copyright laws changed in 1927"
What happened to © laws in 1927? I thought they had been (as of 1927) fairly static since 1909. Do they mean before the work was published in 1927?
Maybe finally, there is a noticeable public backlash against indefinite copyright, and they are doing this to pacify that. The trick usually works.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
From TFA comments:
If people sing it in a different key, is that copyright infringement?
Yes. (At least in Australia.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
No matter if it's "Steamboat Willie" or the "Happy Birthday Song"; No matter if it's Disney or Warner Music - the fact is that the corporations can cheat the public so easily is because government of the United States of America has lend a helping hand
No matter if it's copyright or patent, the abuse by the corporations has been so rampant for so many years, with the public the one ended up being fleeced, the fault lies on those motherfuckers on the capitol hill
They are the ones who have passed the one-sided laws favoring the corporations
They are the ones who have betrayed us times and times again !
Pox on 'em !!!
Captha: witches
Have gnu, will travel.
How can it be in the interest of the two teachers creating a book of school songs at the turn of the 20th century that children all over the world would be singing their songs without fear of landing their teachers and kindergarteners in jail? Something like 120 years or so after their creation? I mean, those teachers only expected their copyright (if they considered it at all) to last a bit after their lifetime at best, and now that they can have a windfall at the expense of the children of the world, why should they not grab all they can? I mean, what else are they going to do now that they are dead?
This comment
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
and this comment
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
relayed the same FUD trying very hard to confuse the general public by mixing up trademark with copyright
I suspect the appearances of both comments so close to each other is not a mere coincidence ... I suspect both comments were written by users working for the pro-patent, pro-copyright camp
They may pretend to be 'blur' but I bet they are not. Their comments were designed to spread the 'blur', with the hope that the general public will become so 'blurred' that they support the corporations' drive to extend the time frame of the patent and copyright until the end of time
Shame on the users who wrote those two comments ! Shame on them !!
They're just claiming the song book wasn't officially licensed. Without proof that it was it's the copyright holders word against theirs, and judges in America always, always side with property rights.
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Neither is it fair that Disney stole Osamu Tezuka's Kimba for use in The Lion King.
The Constitutional requirement is: (1) to authors and inventors, (2) for a limited time, (3) in order to promote progress in the sciences and arts.
It is impossible that extending the copyright term for works of a fifty-year-dead author can encourage him to produce more work. Nor is the resulting term "limited" in either in mathematical or human terms. And the current Mickey Mouse "copyright owners" are certainly NOT that author nor inventor.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Could corporations who paid for licenses for the so-called rights to use the song sue Warner Music to get (some) of their money back?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
To say the "new evidence surfaced from Warner Music" is rather misleading. The plaintiffs independently found the evidence; what they got from Warner had the evidence "blurred out". Here's the summary from TFA:
Warner, of course, denies that conclusion. rsilvergun may be right, but the date of the songbook relative to the date of the "copyright" and of the changes to copyright law would seem to weaken Warner's argument fatally.
Remember a few days ago, The UK proposed a 10 year copyright violation imprisonment? Next up, what if the "rights" holders for "Happy Birthday" decide to go all RIAA and sue everyone they can. All you have to do is open up Facebook or Instagram, and bam, thousands of families can be taken straight to prison for ten years. That'll teach them.
God spoke to me
-We would still be paying the heirs of Mozart (and every other person who ever created anything original), and would have to keep track of their lineage.
-A corporation could pay off authors of successful works and extend copyright forever (it already exceeds a lifetime).
-You would have to pay royalties for merely humming or whistling a tune while in a public space.
-When a work is no longer "profitable", a corporation can destroy it. This deprives the public of culture.
Thank you for staying on-topic.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Was it done to a digital image with a convolution kernel?
Or was it some sort of smudge in the doc they scanned.
Or something else.
It would pretty funny if it was the first.
This would be pretty good evidence that somebody did it on purpose.
Here's a copy published in 1911 (words only, but it makes it clear that this song well predates the 1935 date the copyright claimants are pegging their millions on).
Title: The Elementary Worker and His Work
Author: Alice Jacobs, et al
Year: 1911
https://books.google.com/books...
Actually, the Copyright Act was replaced entirely in 1976 (becoming effective in 1978), and has been amended some, yet in substantial ways, since then. Noises are being made about a new Copyright Act coming along in the near future.
The person who wrote the summary is a bit confused. What happened is that the Warner claim was based on a copy published in 1935. Evidence was discovered of a copy that was published in 1927. That's not terribly interesting, but a copy published in 1922 has also come to light. That is interesting, because the cutoff for copyright on published works is 1923. (Due to the duration of copyright prior to the effective date of the 1976 Act, which retroactively lengthened the term of copyrights that were still in force)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.