Five things we learned this week: Happy Birthday, .sucks trademark, and more
This week the copyright dispute over the “Happy Birthday to You” lyrics heated up, while Vox Populi filed a trademark for ‘.sucks’. Here we provide some analysis on those developments, as well as three more.
A birthday gift
You rarely hear it being sung in films or television shows, but you definitely know it. “Happy Birthday to You” is probably the most recognised song of all time, and this week the dispute over its copyright (or lack of it) got really interesting. A film-making company, which paid the copyright owner Warner/Chappell $1,500 to use the song in 2013 before suing the company, claimed to have unearthed new evidence proving that the song’s lyrics were not protected by copyright long before 1935—the date Warner/Chappell was relying on.
