Lawyers who won Happy Birthday copyright case sue over “We Shall Overcome” | Hacker News Reader

Lawyers who won Happy Birthday copyright case sue over “We Shall Overcome”

arstechnica.com

159 pointswalterbell50 comments

I am generally a fan of international trade. It is the force that has lifted billions of people out of extreme poverty.

I also believe it makes sense to have international IP protection to the degree that The IP metaphor actually promotes useful arts and sciences. But I am really displeased with the fact that the TPP makes the 70-year copyright term a (likely permanent) fixture of international law.

You can find the full text here: https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/tran...

The offending language is Article 18.63 within the Intellectual Property section.

I don't know if it's fair to blame the TPP-- it seems that everybody everywhere was independently converging upon this. The EU, for instance, moved from 50-year copyright terms to 70-year in 2011.[1]

It's yet another case of a motivated special interest.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/sep/12/musicians-copyr...

I was unaware of that. It is a shame. I had been holding out hope that the rise of pirate parties in Europe meant that there was enough of a countervailing special interest to push things back to 14+14.

Rather than Europe, I imagine the biggest countervailing force going forward will be a billion-strong market of Chinese consumers who don't consider IP rights to exist, and don't really care whether the products they're purchasing are originals or bootlegs.

Once upon a time, Americans didn't care about violating European (largely British) copyright. I expect at some point, the Chinese will start moving to protect the "originality" of their near copies which will get more legitimately original over time.

Unfortunately it's really difficult to produce cultural products (films, TV, books, etc.) in China because you never know when the censors are going to shut you down -- unless what you've produced is so bland there's no way anyone could find it objectionable.

This will have to be fixed before China can start producing its own export-quality cultural products.

They will be led to believe these rights exist when there's sufficient Chinese artistic IP that people from abroad want to use.

They aren't going to push for limited copyight terms though.

Just on this a+b issue. I think the +b is the most objectionable part of the whole thing and I wish people would not propose a return to shorter terms but include that as a sop.

My reasoning is this. If I publish something, and claim copyright on it '(c) yyyy' for example. Then, after yyyy+a years it could be known by all to be copyright free, because you have the original published document in your hand which states the start date and the term is known. With the possible +b included, it becomes difficult to determine what the copyright status is because you don't know if it has been 'extended' so you really need to wait until after yyyy+a+b. With the current system of life+b then its even harder to know if a published work is out of copyright unless the author is well known, and because this suits the entrenched interests I believe that it is at least partially intentional.

If pirate parties or anybody else want to campaign for copyright reform, then my utmost wish would be that they fix this issue at the start. Lets have a fixed term please.

The problem with fixed terms is that there's really two classes of copyrighted things: junk and treasure. The opposition in this debate is obsessed with treasure. They love the rare, valuable IPs that retain relevance for decades. A scheme that still assigns long copyright terms to treasure is much easier to pass. Then at least the junk can have short copyright terms. That might seem pointless, but the fact is that there's a lot more junk than treasure in the world. And, just because the copyright holder didn't value it doesn't mean it's useless. After all, one man's junk is another man's treasure.

That's why the copyright term should be flexible. A natural way to achieve this would be to tax copyright (why not? many other properties are taxed, why not IP?) progressively over time. For example first three years zero tax, fourth year $1000 and doubling every year from that. When copyright holder is not willing to pay the tax anymore, the piece of work moves to public domain. This solves also the orphan works issue automatically. (Obviously, there are some international details to be sorted out with this idea.)

Then what about me. A lone programmer who can't afford to pay that much and takes advantage of the fact that software you write is implicitly copyrighted?

I think in my ideal system everything would get a decade or two implicitly. After that you'd need to register. I'm not sure there'd be much point in making registration expensive, either. It could probably be free.

The main principle is just that if you no longer care about something enough to do a little work to keep it, then the time has come to release the rights to that thing into the public domain. A bit of paperwork every ten years may be good enough for that.

Registration could also clarify ownership. Problems like what happened with NoLF [1] or Google Books might be less likely.

[1] http://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-c...

> A bit of paperwork every ten years may be good enough for that. Disney would then be able to keep their copyrights as long as they want. They have the money to purchase politicians, why wouldn't they be able to spend a few extra grand or so to file paperwork.

There would be a limit on the number of renewals a work could have. Though, it's true that Disney would probably renew as many times as possible for all of its major works. The fact that the reform wouldn't seriously affect their business is a compromise to help make it more politically plausible.

I wouldn't blame the TPP, I'd blame the powers behind the TPP. This is an effort that's been going on in parallel along many fronts.

Why don't people want copyright? Say you wrote a book. Why should other companies/other people be able to copy it just because a certain number of years has passed?

Because the book you wrote is not original. It is based on the work of many that have come before it, and just like you copied others (perhaps indirectly) those that came after you should be able to do the same with your work.

Ideas should be shared. We could find a way to make sure people benefit from their work without restricting access to knowledge and culture.

Could find a way or should find a way? I don't think anybody has found such a way. We might not be able to.

This article makes a pretty good argument for a shorter term: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/oct/07/shorter-c...

Copyright isn't a "natural" right. For physical possessions, you can defend them or have others defend them. For copyright, you are using my tax money to have the government prevent what I can do with what ideas are presented to me, even if it doesn't directly harm you. So it feels kind of like bullying.

But copyright does make sense "for a limited time". I think the big issues is that the current time limits don't make sense. Let's say that you interpret that having a government-enforced monopoly on creative works is what lets you make money off them, and that making money is what promotes the initial creation of those works. In reality, most of the market value on the vast majority of instances of several classes of works is much shorter than "life of the author plus 70 years". For example, a new hit song may sale quite a bit in the first year, a bit more over the next few years, then it dies out into obscurity. Long copyrights keep such works dead (no one will continue to publish it if it doesn't make money, and nobody else is allowed to publish it). So this is a net loss to society.

Now what what really makes sense, and feels more fair, is that if you as an author want to use my government's force to maintain an exclusive monopoly on your work, then you should pay for that service. This could be a per year fee (doesn't have to be a lot), so that if the work becomes abandoned then it doesn't become lost to society.

Physical property rights aren't natural either. We depend on the government to prevent theft. Without that, anybody strong enough could just break into our house and take what they wanted.

What may be natural, is the human feeling of ownership. But that isn't always aligned with the legal definition. For example poor people feeling that their gentrifying neighborhood is being taken away from them, even when they didn't "own" any land in it. Plagiarism too - we don't like to see others take credit for our work or ideas (which aren't copyright).

For-pay copyright sounds like a good idea. I wonder though if it would prevent many lucky great work getting off the ground. You'd have to predict in advance that it might be successful before paying the fee. Poor creators of work would lose their right to copyright because they didn't want to take that gamble on everything they produced.

> For-pay copyright sounds like a good idea. I wonder though if it would prevent many lucky great work getting off the ground.

Grant a decade for free. After ten years, you probably know if it's successful or not. Then you could choose to register for more (or not) with a good understanding of its value.

because the freedom to share ideas and culture is paramount, first and foremost. There exists no legitimacy to the end of restricting people's ability to share things. The only reason copyright law exists is as a means to the end of promoting economic basis for progress (and so, it is failing whenever it isn't achieving that end).

And copyright and patents were introduced to foster creation and publishing of new works. Why do you think patents are public once filed? By having a copyright system, creators were encouraged to create and publish more, knowing they could reap the benefits for a reasonable time, while allowing others to reuse it under well-defined terms.

All art is based upon the past.

Normally laws are constructive: you can do anything, unless it's so objectionable that people pass a law against it.

Let's say I am the first one to find a star. Should I be able to stop other people from looking at it? Maybe, but the burden is on me to convince a lot of people that such a law is justified; not on stargazers to justify why they should be able to look at it.

Copyright for a limited term makes sense. It doesn't make sense to have copyright extend 70 years after the author's death, which is the current regime in the US.

How does protectionism lift people out of extreme poverty? I thought the consensus was that it was the lowering of tariffs that gradually did that, not the creation of new ones.

Some protectionism helps poorly developed industries grow locally until they're competitive enough to compete globally (eg postwar Japan). However, other protectionism maintains inefficient industries at the expense of poor people in other countries who could do the same job cheaper (eg US agriculture)

>However, other protectionism maintains inefficient industries at the expense of poor people in other countries who could do the same job cheaper

...thus protecting the nation's citizens from having their jobs exported overseas. How is that not government protecting the nation's best interests?

To borrow an example from here in Zambia. In the 1960s Zambia used to have a textile industry that produced clothes sold in the region. That's disappeared because it couldn't compete with cheap imports from Asia and second-hand clothes from the west. A bit of protectionism would be required to get that industry started again, and with enough investment, it could eventually hopefully become competitive without protectionism.

Stupid apologetic attempt of first world rulers.

This is just another example of the disastrous copyright system in America. The whole thing needs overhaul. I hope there's a flood of similar lawsuits to constantly remind politicians of the idiocy of their resistance to reform.

Ah, so this is good news.

Headline should be adjusted to indicate that Happy Birthday became public domain thanks to their work.

From my understanding, Happy Birthday isn't necessarily public domain, but rather the true owner's are unknown at this time until someone can come forward and claim ownership, and defend ownership in court. But it sounds like it will be very difficult for someone to successfully do and therefore, Happy Birthday is possibly public domain.

Just to chime in:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/happy-birthday-is...

"The most important part of the whole case was having the song in the public domain."

That is describing the lawyers goal, but technically the summary judgment order by the judge didn't find that the song was in the public domain. The order did find that the defendants had zero proof that they were assigned the rights to the song.

Basically the judge found that Warner didn't own the song. But didn't go so far as saying nobody owned it.

The order says: " Because Summy Co. never acquired the rights to the Happy Birthday lyrics, Defendants, as Summy Co.’s purported successors-in-interest, do not own a valid copyright in the Happy Birthday lyrics."

There are real questions to whether the song is actually in the public domain. The date of authorship is unclear and some the actions undertaken by the alleged authors might have sent the work into the public domain.

Cool - at this rate, 3498 years from now, I'll be able to sing songs that I've sung from the time I could speak in front of people without paying the great-grandchildren of someone who stole the copyright of somebody who learned the song from somebody he met busking, then eventually died in poverty 80 years ago, having been paid $25.

Amazing that people paid over $14 million in royalties to sing Happy Birthday; wow, utter madness!!

I hope there's a big gathering in front of the courthouse when this goes to trial. With singing.

I hope that if he had it to do over, Pete Seeger would not copyright a centuries-old song of oppressed people. We should all think about the long-term results of temporarily convenient actions.

There's a real Pirate Party moment happening in Iceland now. And judging by the tone here, the time seems right for a change.

https://twitter.com/Kopimism/status/721150098453897216

I'm curious why their request to use the song was denied.

The title is unnecessarily inflammatory. In the US, lawyers do not sue anyone. They're not allowed to. They represent clients.

Maybe the situation is that the putative copyright holders of We Shall Overcome hired the same successful legal team from the Happy Birthday case — a very rational thing to do.

Bastards should be lynched. Authors of the song created it to be sung.

Songwriter chasers are the new ambulance chasers.

Sick of hearing these stupid 'songs' anyway. good riddance.

Happy Birthday is a trite stupid song. We Shall Overcome is a beautiful, inspiring, and musically rich anthem. The only thing they have in common is being old cultural heritage that assholes have illegally and immorally cashed-in on.

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