"Happy Birthday" is now part of the public domain.

Now it can be performed without someone who had nothing to do with it wanting royalties. No more of that stupid "happy happy birthday, happy happy birthday....." By wait staff at restaurants.

quote:

---

You can now sing “Happy Birthday” without having to worry anyone will try to charge you for doing so

---

quote:

---

Yes, “Happy Birthday to You” now is officially in the public domain, according to a ruling last week by federal District Judge George H. King, of the Central District of California. No longer will restaurant wait staff have to sing ridiculous knock-offs when they encircle a table for the purpose of wishing red-faced and unsuspecting diners good will on the anniversary of their nativity.

True, people have been singing “Happy Birthday” royalty free at private parties for decades. Every child knows it by heart. But the song’s alleged rights holders (currently Warner/Chappell, the publishing arm of Warner Music Group, formerly a subsidiary of Warner Bros.) routinely have gone after anyone who performed “Happy Birthday” as part of any public, profit-making endeavor, insisting upon their cut of the cake.

The copyright storm whirling around “Happy Birthday” is enough to make even the most hardened intellectual property attorney reach for his galoshes. The tune was written by two sisters in 1893 and, as everyone agrees, is long out of copyright. The lyrics, however, are another matter. No one really knows who came up with them, but they’ve been around at least 80 years.

Owing to the all the confusion, the judge held that Warner/Chappell never purchased the rights to “Happy Birthday” in the first place — just one particular arrangement of it — so it couldn’t charge people for performing it.

Now, at long last, people can sing “Happy Birthday” without receiving a bill.

One might wonder how an 80-year-old song, whose composers are long dead and unknown, could even possibly still be under copyright protection.

Many popular characters and stories, as well as songs, would have fallen into the public domain years ago had not their corporate owners repeatedly taken their argument to Congress and convinced lawmakers to extend copyright protection for ever-longer periods of time. That’s why Disney still has a monopoly on Mickey Mouse, and Warner Bros. retains sole ownership of Bugs Bunny and Batman.

The individuals who created those characters, however, are long dead. No profit incentive in the world can wring more work out of them.

Disney’s and Warner’s gains are the public’s losses. Copyright is meant to encourage creativity, not enable near-perpetual monopolies. After a point, continued copyright protection stifles creativity.

Dracula and Sherlock Holmes both have entered the public domain, and they are the two most frequently adapted literary characters in the English language precisely because of it. They are everywhere: television, movies, books, you name it.

If Congress hadn’t converted copyright from an incentive for artists to an unlimited slush fund for large media conglomerates, the copyright on “Happy Birthday” long ago would have ceased to be an issue.

It’s only because “Happy Birthday” is a special case that it is now free to be sung, even to people in restaurants, whether they really want it or not.

---

Since this article is about how absurd copyright laws can become, surely they won't mind that I copy and pasted the article.


Happy Birthday too you.