5.2 KiB
Copyright Claims to the Happy Birthday Song are Invalid
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Author: u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy*
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URL: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-happy-birthday-song-lawsuit-decision-20150922-story.html
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Score: 11
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Created: 2015-09-30T04:02:24
Post:
Comments:
u/xamueljones [+11] My arch-enemy is entropy (2 minutes later)
I posted this, because a significant portion of our reading is fanfiction and copyright law is a big part of writing fanfiction.
I'm hoping for a discussion about this.
This also means that you can now legally use the Happy Birthday song at your party now!
P.S. If people have trouble with this, I will take this down and repost it on the Friday thread.
u/PeridexisErrant [+3] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (21 hours later)
That's probably better for similar content in future, but we'll leave this post. What's the point of human moderators without discretion?
u/Transfuturist [+16] Carthago delenda est. (34 minutes later)
A spokesman for Warner/Chappell, the publishing arm of Warner Music, said, "We are looking at the court's lengthy opinion and considering our options."
Have they considered the option to go fuck themselves?
u/Bowbreaker [+5] Solitary Locust (an hour later)
I'm curious what kind of precedence this sets. I hope the impact is large as opposed to it being limited to this very specific case only.
u/xamueljones [+12] My arch-enemy is entropy (2 hours later)
I'm kinda hoping it'll at least apply to /u/alexanderwale's Tarzan fanfiction. Because Tarzan is a character which should've passed into the public domain by now, and is still being held as a trademark and is preventing people from even referencing the iconic character in their own works.
u/Transfuturist [+4] Carthago delenda est. (11 hours later)
If it's being held as a trademark, then this case doesn't really have much of an effect. That would probably require a case in itself. Fucking trademarks.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (16 hours later)
This decision is very narrow and doesn't really do much to set precedent, since it's a matter of finding facts rather than interpreting law (I always think of legal cases as being divided into the categories of "Did you kill your neighbor's dog?" and "Is it legal to kill your neighbor's dog?", which is naive but very helpful). If I ever end up writing that Tarzan fic, it's probably going to be with the possibility of being sued by ERB Inc. in mind (alternately, free on the web, but that would require shutting down my Patreon, which comes with some real frictional costs). Part of the reason that precedent hardly ever gets set is that people aren't willing to fight things like this; it makes more sense to just fold, or never to write a derivative work at all. The somewhat recent Klinger decision regarding Sherlock Holmes wasn't just notable for the precedent that it set but also for the fact that Klinger was willing to press the issue.
u/clawclawbite [+3] (14 hours later)
The case was about how the ownership was not clearly sold. The music was, but the documentation of the lyrics did not hold up.
This was not a case about usage or the insane term length.
u/autotldr [+1] (5 months later)
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 90%. (I'm a bot)
None of the companies that have collected royalties on the "Happy Birthday" song for the past 80 years held a valid copyright claim to one of the most popular songs in history, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled on Tuesday.
The sisters published the song in a book called "Song Stories for the Kindergarten," and assigned the copyright to their publisher, Clayton F. Summy Co., in exchange for a cut of the sales.
At various turns in the case, attorneys argued over whether the Hill sisters had actually written the song, whether they had "Abandoned" their rights to what became the "Happy Birthday" tune and even whether Patty Smith Hill had been accurately quoted in a 1935 Time magazine article about the song.
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