Did someone really own the copyright to Happy Birthday?

It is sung at kitchen tables, in classrooms and in restaurants every single day. It is probably the first song many of us ever learned. So it comes as a shock to discover that, for most of the 20th century and well into the 21st, a company was charging money for it, and that this only ended after a filmmaker took them to court.

The short answer

Yes, in practice. Music publisher Warner/Chappell collected licensing fees for Happy Birthday to You, earning around $2 million a year by 2008. Then, on 22 September 2015, US District Judge George H. King ruled that its copyright claim over the lyrics was invalid. In 2016 a court declared the song to be in the public domain in the US. In the European Union, copyright expired on 1 January 2017.

The real story

The melody goes back to a song called Good Morning to All, traditionally credited to the sisters Patty and Mildred Hill and dated to 1893, although even that authorship has been questioned. The birthday words were later sung to the same tune.

In 1935 the Summy Company registered a copyright, and that registration became the foundation of the claim. In 1988 Warner/Chappell bought the company, reportedly for $25 million, and with it the right to charge for public performances of the song in films, TV shows and adverts. It has been estimated that the song brought in more than $50 million in fees over the years.

The twist came from a documentary. Filmmaker Jennifer Nelson was making a film about the song itself and was charged $1,500 to use it. She sued. Judge King looked at the history and found that the 1935 copyright covered only a specific piano arrangement, not the lyrics or the familiar melody. In early 2016 Warner/Chappell agreed to pay $14 million to settle with people who had paid to license the song. That was a big climbdown: the company had expected to hold on to the rights until 2030, and the song was expected to earn millions more before then. Judge King himself had not declared the song free for all; that came with the final settlement, approved by the court in June 2016.

Why people get it wrong

A song this simple and this universal feels as if it has always existed, like a nursery rhyme passed down through the centuries. It is hard to imagine anyone sending an invoice for it. But the song is only a little over a century old, and copyright law in the 20th century stretched protection for a very long time.

Guinness World Records once named it the most recognised song in the English language. For decades, it was also one of the most profitable, at least for the people collecting the money.

“Four lines, one of them’s just somebody’s name, and it pulled in millions. Wrong business, I’m in.”