Opinion Happy birthday, world!
Finally, the best-known English song is free of the clutches of the copyright regime.
Eighty years after “Happy Birthday” became a copyrighted milch cow for the music industry, a Los Angeles judge has set it free. In the meantime, Warner Brothers has been making about $2 million off the song every year, and may have accumulated up to $50 million in revenues. Now, if the thousands of creative people who have ponied up to use the song in shows, recordings and even books start demanding their money back, the administrative costs alone would give Warner a splitting headache.
Warner acquired “Happy Birthday” by means of a favourite activity: mergers and acquisitions. The melody of the song, which is attributed to two sisters who lived in Louisville, Kentucky, at the end of the 19th century, could be even older. But they were certainly the first to popularise it among schoolchildren, who set it rolling on the path to world conquest. The song was repeatedly published without a copyright notice until 1935, when one suddenly appeared, bagging the rights for the Clayton F. Summy Company, which was acquired by a group that was swallowed whole by Warner in 1988. And ever since, everyone who wanted to use the most ubiquitous song in the English language has had to pay for the privilege. That was until a singer and two documentary filmmakers got mad and filed suits, which expanded into a class action in 2013.
India, where the DVD pirate proudly buckles his swash between the cauliflower-seller and the cobbler in streetside markets, has been unmoved by this David and Goliath battle, but it has caused rapture among restaurant staff worldwide. For decades, they have had to tweak the song each time a patron hosted a birthday party to evade claims. Happy birthday to them, the universe and everything — it’s party time on the global commons.
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