Charity claims it owns “Happy Birthday” song’s copyright | Hacker News Reader

Charity claims it owns “Happy Birthday” song’s copyright

arstechnica.com

42 pointsnkurz20 comments

Please note: "Happy Birthday" is well out of copyright in a number of countries that aren't the USA. Including Australia, and any other country that applied the rule that copyright expired 50 years after the death of the author. According to Wikipedia, the copyright expires in the EU at the end of next year (70 years after the death of the last author).

The fact that copyright extends for so long is a travesty and is something that we all should be fighting against (along with all the myriad of other injustices around...).

This case is sufficiently absurd that its very existence hurts the credibility of the courts. They're allowing peoples' right to sing "Happy Birthday" to depend on the details of a sale that took place in 1893.

Ancient copyrights are the ultimate rent seeking of our time.

Not land ownership?

The difference between land and music is that land is actually scarce.

Also, nobody ever really builds expensive things on top of music that they'll lose if it's suddenly played by other people.

Actually they sort of do: people make derivative works or compilations that become encumbered when something out of copyright is found to be in copyright again. Something which has happened thanks to nonsense like "common law" state copyrights and retroactive extensions.

Of course, that's an argument against the practice rather than for it.

No ones paying property taxes on IP.

How on earth is a 100+ year old song still in copyright anyway, even if the author was known?

It looks like this will be the norm in a couple of years. I expect that there will be a time when no music or books are entering the public domain anymore.

We're basically there already. Disney pushes back the copyright date every decade or two so that Mickey Mouse (steamboat willy, 1920s) never gets into the public domain.

The ip Disney is trying to protect is Winnie the poo.

Well you know, if the author's grand-grandchildren don't live off his work, it might make him not want to create anymore...

Or it could be just that the corporations which bought many of the money-making copyrights long ago want to continue to receive royalties from it indefinitely.

A tangential question - if ownership is established, would said owner have a case against Warner for the $2M a year they've been raking in against an illegitimate copyright claim?

The timing basis for copyright starts counting down at the date of first authorized publication, not at the state of conception. Well, pre-1976; the 1976 copyright act actually starts the clock from the date of fixation.

The essential problem with the Happy Birthday song is that no one is quite sure who created it, and thus no one is quite sure which publication (if any!) would be an actual authorized publication. It thus falls under really, really gray areas of the law.

It should be noted, however, that the most plausible scenario that could win a victory at court (in terms of being able to prove that copyright exists) would have the copyright expire in about 400 days anyways.

It's a good thing TPP will strengthen copyright laws and lengthen terms, err wait, what did I say?

a few weeks ago the supreme court said it wasn't able to have the copyright law applied to it

A "birthday charity" sounds like a great idea to me.

Have a party, sing the song, everyone present donates $1 to charity for the "licensing rights".

I haven't done the math, but I'm sure it's not an insignificant amount of money.

Charity: water has a program similar to this.

Except collecting donations for charity:water actually goes to bring water to developing countries instead of the pockets of billionaires. Minor difference.

My comment did not advocate benefiting billionaires.

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