You may not have known it, but as implausible as it seems, somebody owns the Happy Birthday song. That has all changed now that US district judge George H King ruled Tuesday that Warner/Chappell Music's claim to the 130-year-old song isn't legal and thus freeing it from copyright and no longer giving them the right to charge royalties for its usage.
The music for "Happy Birthday," which has become so ubiquitous in society that you don't even think about where they came from, was actually written 1883 by a pair of sisters, Mildred and Patty Hill. They then assigned the rights to the music to Clayton F. Summy.
Warner Music acquired Summy's successor, Birchtree, Ltd in 1988, presumably with the "Happy Birthday" as one of its primary targets. According to CNN Money, it reportedly paid $25 million at the time to acquire the company.
King ruled that the original copyright filed in 1935 by the Clayton F Summy Co. only applied to a specific arrangement of the tune, not to the lyrics themselves.
"Because Summy Co never acquired the rights to the Happy Birthday lyrics, [the] defendants, as Summy Co's purported successors-in-interest, do not own a valid copyright in the Happy Birthday lyrics," King wrote in a judgment posted online.
Chappell were being sued by a film-maker Jennifer Nelson who was told that she had to pay $1,500 in order to include Happy Birthday in a documentary about its history. They argued that Chappell could only possibly claim the limited piano arrangement, not the actual lyrics.
"Happy Birthday is finally free after 80 years," said Randall Newman, an attorney for the plaintiffs via The Guardian. "Finally, the charade is over. It's unbelievable."
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