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10 August 2015Copyright

WIPR survey: Copyright protection lasts too long, readers declare

The term of copyright protection typically lasts too long and should be slashed, readers have declared.

For our most recent survey we asked whether copyright protection lasts too long, following recent developments in the long-running copyright dispute over the lyrics to “Happy Birthday to You”, which is more than 120 years old.

Late last month, a film-making company that had to pay copyright owner Warner/Chappell $1,500 to use the song for a 2013 documentary before suing the record label, claimed to have made a breakthrough.

The company, Good Morning to You Productions, said it had found new evidence which proved that the song’s lyrics were not protected by copyright long before 1935—the date Warner/Chappell has been relying on.

The song itself was written before 1893.

Responding to the survey, 77% of readers said they thought copyright protection typically lasts too long.

One respondent said: “The balance between the reasonable right to exploit the works of others once the author has had a reasonable monopoly is 20 years for patents and generally 15 for industrial designs. It seems to me bizarrely unbalanced that copyright exceeds the author’s lifetime by 50 years in my jurisdiction and as much as 70 years in others. Why the disparity?”

Another reader said copyright protection should subsist only “for one generation” or for about 30 years after the author’s death.

“This would permit the immediate family to have the benefit of the author’s copyright but no longer,” the reader added.

But some were in favour of a more drastic reduction with one respondent claiming that copyright should not last more than five years and that the term of protection should be uniform internationally.

“Otherwise it gives rise to unproductive business models that horde and capitalise on stale IP,” the respondent added.

This week, WIPR asks: “An official song for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics has been accused of ripping off a track from the Disney Movie ‘Frozen’. Is this bad for China’s IP reputation?”

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More on this story

Copyright
28 July 2015   A film-making company working on a documentary about the song “Happy Birthday to You” has filed new evidence that “proves conclusively that there is no copyright” to the lyrics.