[78-L] Happy Court Day to You

[David Lennick]

About time somebody challeneged this ludicrous situation.

dl

> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/nyregion/lawsuit-aims-to-strip-happy-birthday-to-you-of-its-copyright.html
> <http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=233f64e8cc&e=dce4828319>
>
>
>   Birthday Song’s Copyright Leads to a Lawsuit for the Ages
>
> Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
>
> Jennifer Nelson, holding a 1924 songbook, “Harvest Hymns,” that includes the
> words “Happy Birthday to You” set to the music of “Good Morning to All,” a song
> written in the late 1800s.
>
>
>             By BENJAMIN WEISER
>             <http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=d7b107d328&e=dce4828319>
>
>
> The song “Happy Birthday to You” is widely credited for being the most
> performed song in the world. But one of its latest venues may be the federal
> courthouse in Manhattan, where the only parties may be the litigants to a new
> legal battle.
>
>
> The dispute stems from a lawsuit filed on Thursday by a filmmaker in New York
> who is seeking to have the court declare the popular ditty to be in the public
> domain, and to block a music company from claiming it owns the copyright to the
> song and charging licensing fees for its use.
>
> The filmmaker, Jennifer Nelson, was producing a documentary movie, tentatively
> titled “Happy Birthday,” about the song, the lawsuit said. In one proposed
> scene, the song was to be performed.
>
> But to use it in the film, she was told she would have to pay $1,500 and enter
> into a licensing agreement with Warner/Chappell, the publishing arm of the
> Warner Music Group. Ms. Nelson’s company, Good Morning to You Productions, paid
> the fee and entered into the agreement, the suit says.
>
> “Before I began my filmmaking career,” Ms. Nelson said in an e-mail forwarded
> by her lawyer, “I never thought the song was owned by anyone. I thought it
> belonged to everyone.”
>
> The lawsuit notes that in the late 1800s, two sisters, Mildred J. Hill and
> Patty Smith Hill, wrote a song with the same melody called “Good Morning to
> All.” The suit tracks that song’s evolution into the familiar birthday song,
> and its ownership over more than a century.
>
> But although Warner/Chappell claims ownership of “Happy Birthday to You,” the
> song was “just a public adaptation” of the original song, one of Ms. Nelson’s
> lawyers, Mark C. Rifkin, said in a phone interview.
>
> “It’s a song created by the public, it belongs to the public, and it needs to
> go back to the public,” Mr. Rifkin said.
>
> A spokesman for Warner/Chappell declined to comment on the suit. The company
> paid $25 million
> <http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=7abc3d5bdc&e=dce4828319>
> in 1988 to acquire Birchtree Ltd., a small company whose musical holdings
> included the birthday song.
>
> Mr. Rifkin cited an estimate that Warner/Chappell collected approximately $2
> million per year in licensing fees for the song. He added that the suit asks
> that the firm return all the fees for the song it has collected in the past
> four years.
>
> The rich history of the song’s evolution and the conclusion that it might be in
> the public domain closely tracks the findings of Robert Brauneis, a professor
> at the George Washington University Law School and the author of a 68-page
> article titled “Copyright and the World’s Most Popular Song.”
>
> In the study, Professor Brauneis said that “it is doubtful that ‘Happy Birthday
> to You,’ the famous offspring of ‘Good Morning to All,’ is really still under
> copyright.”
>
> “I believe this song is in the public domain and therefore it is not owned by
> anyone,” Professor Brauneis said in a phone interview on Thursday. He said
> “Happy Birthday to You” was “economically significant” in that it “still
> produces millions of dollars of income in a year,” and that a successful legal
> challenge “might be a model for challenges to other songs.”
>
> He said that another of Ms. Nelson’s lawyers, Randall S. Newman, had spoken
> with him about his study, but that he was not a consultant in the lawsuit.
>
> Ms. Nelson is not the first documentarian to confront the issue of paying to
> use the Happy Birthday song. The filmmaker Steve James paid $5,000 to use the
> song in the acclaimed 1994 documentary “Hoop Dreams,” in which it is sung at a
> man’s 18th birthday party.
>
> “It was an important scene,” Mr. James said in a 2005 article
> <http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=182d15dfec&e=dce4828319>
> in The New York Times, “there was some amazement that Arthur had made it to 18.
> Of course, we wanted that in.”
>
> Ms. Nelson, asked what she envisioned for her documentary, responded in the
> e-mail that her film would be about the “song’s history and its future.” The
> suit seeks to be given class-action status on behalf of all others who have
> paid licensing fees for it since 2009.
>
>
>             A version of this article appeared in print on June 14, 2013, on
>             page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Birthday Song’s
>             Copyright Leads to a Lawsuit for the Ages.
>
>
> 		
>
>