Topic: Happy Birthday to You: Lawsuit Edition

[idolminds]

You ever notice that in movies or TV shows when its someones birthday they don't sing the Happy Birthday song but some other random old song? Thats because Warner claims copyright and you have to license it. Which is stupid.

A new challenger approaches! Some dudes making a documentary about the history of the song have dug through all the old copyrights and found that all of them should be expired (this was in the time before Disney and perpetual copyright). So they are now suing Warner and want them to pay back the millions of dollars they have collected over the years. It should be fun to see where this goes.

[Cools!]

Good!

[Cobra951]

Awesome!

[Xessive]

What?! I thought it was a public domain song! Like "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" which incidentally has the same tune as the ABC's song.

[idolminds]

Everyone assumed it was public domain as well. Then Warner started taking people to court over it and it was cheaper to settle and pay the licensing fee than to go through with the court case. That's what makes this case special, they want to determine its standing once and for all. Looking at the evidence they have I think they have a really strong case.

Kind of amazing how much of our culture is "owned". Thanks, Disney.

[gpw11]

Totally kind of unrelated but you reminded me: Mickey Mouse must be up again in 10 years right? Which means they'll probably have to start trying to push something through for an extension pretty soon.  Strangely, I'm actually excited to see this go down.   I also still don't get why, since characters like that are generally trademarked and can't be used anyway? Like, having Mickey Mouse public domain wouldn't really mean much since he's an enforceable trademark as long as Disney can argue that they still have him in use as part of their branding.


Back on topic....good, what a bunch of assholes I guess. I mean, I can't blame them for trying to hold on to it, but the PR move of letting lapse into public domain would have been brilliant.  That said, I don't really know how successful this will be....assuming that they don't hold the copyright and assuming it's through some technical error and not misrepresentation I don't know if you can really sue for paying licensing fees when you didn't have to.  I could see it being one of those "Well, you should have probably looked into it a little bit" kind of things.