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Happy Birthday Now Pay the License Fee

By William Patry

I confess to vastly preferring the Beatles' You Say its Your Birthday to the traditional Happy Birthday. (Here is a link to the Beatles singing the traditional song, though). Nevertheless, for copyright geeks, the traditional Happy Birthday has provided fodder for what all that is wrong with copyright. Now, Professor Robert Brauneis of George Washington Law School has blessed us with an exhaustive treatment of the song. Available here on ssrn, the article is entitled "Copyright and the World's Most Popular Song," Professor Brauneis gives us 67 and a half pages of history of the song and the copyright issues surrounding it. He has also generously provided a an amazing resource -- a website hosting over a hundred documents relating to the song:

http://docs.law.gwu./edu/facweb/rbrauneis/happybirthday.htm

The article is a tour de force of historical research as well as a probing inquiry into how copyright works that have fallen into the public domain can still command serious income through the inability of others to spend the time and money to track down the provenance of the claims to copyright in them. For those interested in the economic effects of term extension, here are some statistics Professor Brauneis offers: "In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the song generated revenues in the range of $15,000 to $20,000 per year. By 1960, the figure was closer to $50,00, and by 1970, over $75,000. But the really dramatic increase in revenue came in the 1980s. By the early 1990s, the song was generating over $1 million per year, and by 1996, reported Forbes magazine, it was 'pull[ing] in slightly less than $2 million a year.'" The Sony Bono term extension did not occur until 2 years later, 1998, while Happy Birthday, then known as "Good Morning to All," was first published in 1893, 115 years ago.

Full post as published by The Patry Copyright Blog on May 05, 2008 (boomark / email).