Feel Free to Sing Happy Birthday ...

Beagle

bapu
I'm pretty sure you doan wan me too sing lead on this juan.

Dave didn't ask you to sing lead, he asked you to sing "Happy Birthday."
 

slartabartfast
A fascinating 43 page decision in which two litigants threw everything but the kitchen sink at each other in motions for summary judgement. The reason that Happy Birthday To You (HBTY), which was written some time prior to its publication in 1893 with words and title Good Morning To All, was not considered to be already in the public domain following the expiration in 1949 of the copyright for the melody registered at that time, is that it was claimed that the lyric HBTY was not published with permission until after the copyright for the lyrics was registered in 1935. There are a series of claims that the work might not have been written by the purported author, that the author may have abandoned the copyright, that the copyright registration may have included errors that invalidate it, that it did not register the lyric but just piano arrangements, that the common law copyright was lost through publication without proper copyright mark etc. All very instructive stuff, complicated by the fact that contracts had been lost, the copyright registration form could be located but not actual copies (deposits) of the work at the Copyright Office, evidence had to be gleaned from newspaper articles and prior lawsuits between the authors and publishers. In the end, no issue was decided except that the author of the lyrics never assigned them to the publisher. Hence the publishers who subsequently acquired the rights from the prior publishers do not own the copyright. The current publisher has purportedly been making more than two million dollars a year on a copyright they do not own according to this decision. The decision does not of itself put the lyrics into the public domain or say that because the publisher does not own a copyright that no one does.
 
http://www.scribd.com/doc...Summary-Judgment-Order