Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we take a look at the biggest piece of music to hit the public domain of copyright perhaps in history, which happened thanks to a court decision earlier this week. That song, of course, is...Happy Birthday!
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp52
On Tuesday, a California federal court ruled that Warner Music Group no longer holds a valid copyright in this iconic Happy Birthday song. This will end a licensing revenue stream from filmmakers and other users of about $2 million a year, thanks to it costing about $1,500 to acquire a single license from Warner for this property. The decision was based on new fact findings that the company which Warner acquired these rights from in 1988 had only ever gotten a copyright in the melody, not the words, and the melody is too old to still be covered by current copyright terms.
Thus, one of the biggest licensed properties in music is now in the public domain, subject to Warner's appeal of course. But other than the appeal, there are still a couple of interesting questions left.
First, this decision will likely cause further scrutiny in chain of title documents that explain how IP rights like copyrights were sold and transferred all the way from the original owner to the current owner. With copyright rights lasting up to and over a century now, these documents can be difficult to maintain or acquire, leading to decisions like the one against Warner. The documents always win in the legal field.
Second, this decision makes the lyrics of Happy Birthday into an orphan work, which is a term commonly applied to works that are not technically in the public domain but nobody can figure out who actually owns the rights. As copyright terms have extended more and more thanks to Congress, we now have copyright terms of life of author plus 70 years for individuals, and 95 or 120 years for corporations. That makes it very hard to find rightful owners of copyrights that do exist on very old works, a problem that grows more and more with copyright term extensions. One wonders how this iconic property joining the ranks of Orphan Works will affect the debate the next time extension of copyright terms come up, which will likely be soon thanks to the corporate interests of Disney and similar organizations.
The Bottom Line is, we can all finally sing Happy Birthday on YouTube without risking a nasty license demand, and that's a good thing in the face of the crazy long copyright term in the U.S.
Until next time, don't feel too bad for Warner, as this week they also got another federal court ruling that the Batmobile is a protectable character under copyright. Of course, it will likely be hard to make $2 million a year licensing the Batmobile...but holy copyright law, Batman!
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