ipbog.ca turns 10 this month. It's been a decade since our
first post in October 2006 and to commemorate
this milestone ...since no-one else will... let's have a look
at IP rights and birthdays.
You may have heard that the lyrics and music to the song
"Happy Birthday" were the subject of a protracted
copyright battle. The lawsuit came as a surprise to many people,
considering this is the "world's most popular song"
(apparently beating out Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, but
that's another copyright story for another time). Warner Music
Group claimed that they owned the copyright to "Happy
Birthday", and when the song was used for commercial purposes
(movies, TV shows, commercials), Warner Music extracted license
fees, to the tune of $2 million each year. When this copyright
claim was finally challenged, a US court ruled that Warner Music
did not hold valid copyright, resulting in a $14 million
settlement of the decades-old dispute in
2016.
