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Comment by realo | Hacker News Reader

Picture this for a moment:

It's your Birthday. Your friends invited you to the nicest restaurant in town. Very nice venue, food is great. End of meal... time for dessert. Your friends love you and, together, singe you the nicest rendition of 'Happy Birthday To You' you ever heard. Life is good.

This was an illegal performance. Secret police comes in, puts your friends in prison (they stole & performed the song) and also you and everyone in the restaurant at that time go to prison as well because you got the song without paying the creators.

Of course, according to the New extended SuperSOPA law, the restaurant is closed down, and it's owner is sent to prison as well, because he should not have allowed all this to happen in the first place.

Do you really want to live in that Orwellian world?

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What's Orwellian is your comparison of singing "Happy Birthday" to what this woman did:

Mid-2010, nine sites connected to movie streaming were targeted by the U.S. government. They included NinjaVideo.net, at the time one of the Internet’s most prominent video streaming sites.

One of her co-founders admitted to making 58k$ off ninja-video.

That's really the crux of things. She didn't help people pirate, she made money off other people's content, and didn't pay a cent for it. To my mind, that's wrong.

It's taken me three hours to really think about your comment, and I can't really think of a satisfying response. Your hyperbole aside, I think this is apples and oranges. I don't think it's a comparable situation.

People playing Nirvana in a garage and singing Happy Birthday to You at birthday parties is not the same thing as downloading material that you have access to buy. It's accepted that we can partake in these luxuries. If we want to profit off them though, we do have to pay a licensing fee.

I'm glad you brought up the point about people profiting from copyrighted works for which they do not have the rights because in the US, that is the only thing that is criminally offensive wrt piracy. Downloading content without payment simply for personal consumption, however, is a civil matter between the copyright holder and the downloader.

The current legislation under consideration surrounding copyrights attempts to shift the burden of enforcement from the private, copyright-holding entities to the public, or another private company that is only tangentially related (i.e. advertising platforms).

The distinction you're drawing seems arbitrary. You could buy a license to "Happy Birthday To You", but instead you choose to perform it without a license. How is appropriating without a proper license to perform a work substiantially different from doing the same thing to watch a work?

Someone should make a short film about this scene, it would go pretty viral.

That would be cool, as long as the 10,000$ license fee for "Happy Birthday" is paid to Warner...

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You

What?! I was reading these comments thinking -- oh that would be funny if everything was under copywrite. I feel violated. The video, if you make it, should end with the fact that it actually is owned by Warner.

The perhaps even stranger part is that there exists a public domain variant of the happy birthday song. The song was modified and it is this version that Warner owns the copyright to (and the one that we sing).

The modification? -- One Note.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You

Yes, given that the song was written in 1893 and has been published with the current melody and lyrics since 1912 it's amazing to think it is still really under copyright, especially given that there is not a single other thing in the world from 1893 or 1912 whose copyright hasn't long since expired.

the really amazing thing is that nobody has invented a new happy birthday song. did we reach perfection and that's it? no creativity for birthday melodies? orwellian or utopian? i can't tell anymore. "It's not utopian to want to build better stuff. It might be utopian to claim the stuff we've got is the best we're capable of."

Thanks, you bring up an excellent ancillary point in the discussion. The momentum of tradition is quite powerful. As a point of comparison, I use a Dvorak keyboard layout which allows me to touch type faster and has reduced my carpal tunnel syndrome effects considerably. I personally know several others that use Dvorak. However, I also realize that most of the world will not be switching from QWERTY because that is just how it is.

Except in this case it's more akin to stealing the meal no?

No, not at all. This is exactly like SOPA. A totally non-infringing activity (serving food in a restaurant) becomes criminal when someone starts playing an infringing song. Now, there is a bit of a hedge here - the rightsholder would technically have to ask you to stop, and you would have to refuse, before the feds came.

But before the Feds come, Warner could put the restaurant out of business by making its banks and credit card processors dump them, newspapers and magazines not advertise them, printers not print their menus, etc. And all of this without a judge ever being involved.

You are using the slippery-slope argument here. That is a fallacy.

I see no slippery slope in his argument. Singing Happy Birthday in public is actually a copyright violation, right now.

De dure, not de facto. Show me a report of someone getting arrested for it. Hence my accurate description of his ridiculous scenario appealing to a slippery-slope style train of thought. Case closed.

It's still not a slippery slope. It's an analogy that illustrates what would be possible, de jure. Honestly, there's no slope involved at all.

It is not an analogy. What is the analogue? The slope is descending from now (you cannot get arrested for singing happy birthday) to then (you can). Slippery.

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