17 Mar
2010
17 Mar
'10
5:25 a.m.
On 16 Mar 2010 at 22:58, Ben wrote:
What surprized me is the "Happy birthday"
song is still copywright. I
think it is the same song, but sometimes you never know just what a
song is named.
The legal discussion of the copyright status of that song has
probably consumed many acres of prime timber. A few years ago, an
acquaintance penned a novelty work titled "Variations on Happy
Birthday to You". He was incredulous when I pointed out that Warner
Brothers still holds copyright on that chestnut (although many
question the validity of the copyright; Wikipedia has a few
paragraphs on it). I advised that changing two opening eighth notes
of the melody to a single quarter note would solve the problem,
provided that the "Birthday" part was left out of the title. I think
he ended up by re-titling to "Variations on a Famous Greeting" and
combining the opening two notes of the melody.
It may or may not be a valid copyright, but Warner's got all the
lawyers.
There's a fairly well documented episode involving Amazon and the
Kindle. Apparently a number of people in the US awoke one morning to
find the copy of George Orwell's "1984" gone from their readers. It
seems that Amazon had mistankenly used an Australian edition where
the work is in the public domain--not so in the US, however.
--Chuck