(Newswire.net — August 20, 2016) — The most performed song of all times, Happy Birthday To You, is now public domain, free for anyone to use without paying royalties. But hasn’t it always been?
The battle over “Happy Birthday” began in 2013 after filmmaker, Jennifer Nelson, received a copyright claim from Warner/Chappell Music Inc. and was asked to pay $1,500 for using the “Happy Birthday To You” song.
Three years later, US District Judge George King ruled that the most famous song of all times is public domain and dismissed the ownership claim. Furthermore, the judge ordered the Warner team to pay $4.6 million in fees, in what was described as an unusually positive result.
“Given the unusually positive results achieved by the settlement, the highly complex nature of the action, the risk class counsel faced by taking this case on a contingency-fee basis, and the impressive skill and effort of counsel, we conclude that a 1.2 multiplier is warranted,” King wrote in a fee order on Tuesday, in the case Rupa Marya v. Warner/Chappell Music Inc.
Author, Rupa Marya, started making a documentary about the “Birthday song” in 2013 when she was asked to pay Warner a royalty fee for the song. Thanks to the Marya’s team, we are all free to use the song which has generated about $5,000 per day, or $2 million a year in royalty fees.
Although evidence showed that the song had appeared in songbooks as early as the 1920s, the Warner company claimed ownership of the song in 1935. In addition, the court found no proof that Patty and Mildred Hill were the original authors of the song, as Warner claimed.
“{A} reasonable fact finder could also find that the Happy Birthday lyrics were written by someone else…and that Patty’s 1935 claim to authorship was a post hoc attempt to take credit for the words that had long since become more famous and popular than the ones she wrote for the classic melody,” Judge King wrote.
It is not known how much losing this lawsuit is going to hurt the film company. Not only has Warner lost the right to copyright revenue and been ordered to pay $4.6 million to settle the lawsuit, the company has to give back a portion of the royalty money that it had acquired by 2009 and the full royalty amount collected from that year until today.
The attorneys who won the case against Warner have developed a business based on the Birthday Song lawsuit. In April they sued over the African American spiritual “We Shall Overcome”, and in June they sued over the Woody Guthrie tune, “This Land is Your Land.”