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The creators may be dead and left no heirs or bequests, a firm may have gone bankrupt without its assets being purchased, or the owners have no idea that they possess rights. “Happy Birthday” may be the oldest orphan ever.īecause copyrights exist at creation independent of any registration, and because rights’ owners don’t have to defend violations to maintain those rights, millions to as many as tens of millions of copyrighted works are “orphans.” They remain under regulatory protection dating back to 1923-and much earlier for unpublished manuscripts-but no owners can be found. That the situation persisted this long and still lacks resolution is a teachable moment about orphaned works.
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The plaintiffs in the suit, including a filmmaker who had planned to make a movie about the song before launching this action, plan to try for class-action certification to force Warner-Chappell to issue refunds dating back years or decades. Schooley says he’s “pretty sure for our purposes, the public domain status would have to be verified to be free to use.” “We always have a gray area between songs that everyone assumes are public domain and what’s officially designated public domain,” says Bob Schooley, a veteran animated series writer and producer, and co-creator of Kim Possible. For studios and publishers, “Happy Birthday” could now be entirely off limits until 2017 or 2030-as explained later-because the lyrics lack either an adjudicated public-domain status or a party that offers a license. Many people and organizations will likely feel free to use the song from now on, but they can’t be sure that some individual or entity might try to sue them later, such as a charity that’s been a long-time beneficiary of licensing fees.
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They are in a state of copyright quantum superposition, like Schrödinger’s Cat: Without a full trial, one that almost certainly won’t take place, no one can know for sure.
![japanese happy birthday song japanese happy birthday song](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yuA1ikIOqJY/hqdefault.jpg)
Worse? It may never be known for sure whether those rights exist. The lyrics-but not the music-may still have outstanding legal protection almost 125 years after they were allegedly conceived.