Happy Copyright to You

Everyone in radio knows you can't sing "Happy Birthday to You" to a listener without logging the details and making sure that the PRS/MCPS Alliance are told about your infringement of someone's copyright.

Ops Room
Originally uploaded by westy48.

As a youth helping out in the ops room at BBC Radio Lancashire I can remember being told that the beneficiary of all this would be a little old granny somewhere in New York.

Now it seems this may not be the case. Professor Robert Brauneis has been looking into this and he thinks that the song is now out of copyright.

The abstract to the paper says "The falsity of the standard story about the song demonstrates the dangers of relying on anecdotes without thorough research and analysis." How true.

(Seen on Boing Boing)

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