Slashdot Mirror
"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.
Whether or not a copyright is used is irrelevant. You're thinking trademarks where they are granted for the context permanently as long as they remain used and defended.
Copyrights are explicitly intended to be for a limited time and for most of American history that limited time was well within the lifespan of an average person. Until relatively recently the only way to obtain a copyright was to explicitly submit the material to the Library of Congress for certification at which point you were granted a 14 year exclusive use. You could apply for an additional 14 year grant but after 28 years the material would be forced to fall into the Public Domain and permanently accessible from the Library of Congress. You had those maximum of 28 years to make as much return on your investment as possible, but you were expected to then reinvest that return into new ventures. It was never intended that an entity could squat on the material indefinitely regardless of whether they continued to make money on it as much of the purpose was to incentivize the creation of new material through the very loss of that monopoly.
The current form of copyright in the US is a perversion of that intention. Aside from the near indefinite monopoly status due to extensions granted to the Disney lobby there is also no requirement to submit the material to an archive. Works are simultaneously locked up permanently as well as lost forever. As with Disney an entity can create one work and rest on their laurels effectively eternally and never have to invest in new art forms. What's worse is that because of Disney everything else not explicitly put into the Public Domain is just as lost, regardless of whether or not anyone is still actively creating new works with it.
Copyright should be renewable forever upon payment of a fee every ten years or so. If a property is so valuable that it generates income, fine. Keep paying the fee and keep the property. If nobody is making money from it and nobody can be bothered to make the payment, then the property falls into the public domain.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I'm guessing Time Warner is going to be giving all those royalties back?
That's what Good Morning to You Productions is demanding in the lawsuit.
When one of the parties commits fraud upon the court, which is what it looks like they did in the discovery or non-discovery of that 1927 songbook, https://www.techdirt.com/artic... judges can get very angry.
They've been knowingly demanding and collecting all that money under false pretenses. That's a little worse than downloading a few mp3s.
The judicial system is so arbitrary and corrupt that anything could happen. But sometimes, once in a while, it actually produces justice.