A music company called Warner/Chappell owns the copyright to the omnipresent ditty that begins “Happy birthday to you”:
A lawsuit filed in federal court last week seeks to change that. The complaint (online here) argues that the copyright to the song, if it ever existed at all, “expired no later than 1921.” Warner/Chappell hasn’t responded to the suit yet …
The story of the song is long and weirdly complex. The short version is: A pair of sisters published a song called “Good Morning to You” in 1893. Over the next few decades, the song morphed into “Happy Birthday to You.” In the 1920s and ’30s, a couple versions of the birthday song were published in copyrighted songbooks. But Happy Birthday to You was in wide circulation for years before it was published and copyrighted, and it’s not clear who wrote that version of the song, according to Mark Rifkin, one of the lawyers who filed the suit.
Jacob Goldstein has a scanned version of the evidence in question, an early “Happy Birthday to You” song from a 1911 “Board of Sunday Schools of the Methodist Episcopal Church” book. He calls it the “one page [that] could end the copyright war.” Previous Dish on the Happy Birthday song here.
The Dish 