Happy Birthday, the copyrights, and the evil pirates!

[DerGolgo]

Oh yes, the pirates, the wicked evil music pirates, they went to work on Happy Birthday to you. But not by making illicit copies of it, no. They didn't bother themselves with the actual music like modern pirates, more with the more traditional pirate booty. Actual gold, that is, money!

http://boingboing.net/2013/06/13/lawsui ... ay-is.html

Lawsuit: "Happy Birthday" is not in copyright, and Warner owes the world hundreds of millions for improperly collected royalties
...
A documentary film company working on a movie about "Happy Birthday" has assembled a huge body of evidence showing that the song has been in the public domain since the 1920s, and is suing Warner to get them to return the hundreds of millions they've improperly charged in licensing since. This is gonna be great.

Oh yes, oh yes, this is going to be great this is. It would have been just wicked awesome if Warner Music, the parent company of that Warner/Chappell business, was still owned by TimeWarner. They like suing people over copyright, don't they. Especially old ladies and infants, or so it seems. Whatever.
The knock-on lawsuits might still fuck them up, also. So far, they have claimed to have acquired the copyright to Happy Birthday in 1988, then they bought another company that claimed that copyright. Can the current owners of Warner Music, some conglomerate, sue TimeWarner for not doing their due diligence back then or something? Warner Music was a public company for a few recent years, might that protect TimeWarner from any lawsuits? Who knows, but one thing is certain, or so I suspect. That a whole bunch of lawyers can now start boat-shopping until this mess is figured out. Whatever Warner Music's legal department is usually up to, they're probably gonna have to work on this for a while.

A pretty major music label in the shit over copyright. Over not just the copying of copyrighted material, but over their very business model, the holding of copyrights and the collection of fees related to that. And over such a well known and widely used song. This is priceless.

[Jaeger]

While I appreciate the value of intellectual-property law...





--Jaeger

[DerGolgo]

While I appreciate the value of intellectual-property law...





--Jaeger

I try to watch that (I know and love that song, though it's not accurate that only German has that word), and instead of singing puppets, I get:

Unfortunately, this SME-music content is not available in Germany because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights.

GEMA is the organization which, under German law, is responsible for collecting the fees for the public performance/transmission of music, on behalf of the composers or their estates (because my grandpa was a professional composer of men's choir music, I'm also a GEMA member, embarrassing as that is). Even if the artists themselves perform something, or transmit it, or want to put it on youtube, they must pay GEMA (to be reimbursed later, it's complicated), they can only get out of it by putting the entire work in question entirely in the public domain, no middle ground, no one-off arrangements. But GEMA can't convince youtube to pay them as much per click as they see fit, and that has been going on for years. More than half of youtube is hence unavailable here, or about half, I once saw a graphic of that someplace. So, even if the people holding the copyrights for that song, for that recording of that song and for the visuals going with it had posted that video, GEMA would have it blocked. Because they, by law, must enforce those copyrights, even if the copyright holders don't want it. No exceptions, these are Germans in Germany, after all.
This, somehow, has a lovely symmetry, doesn't it.

[Jaeger]

This, somehow, has a lovely symmetry, doesn't it.

Oh, the irony! It burns! Haaahahaha

Touché.

--Jaeger