Tiny Tim
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- Jan 4, 2010
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Does a statute of limitations apply here at all? If there are laws that protect criminals who for example steal for real from being arrested for it after so many years why the hell wouldn't a songwriter be protected after that many years! What I've learned today? Stealing valuables, actual property and goods is less of a crime than sounding similar to a song! Epic fail here!
Not sure about Australia, but I know in the States you can file for extensions on copy writes. In the states, Happy Birthday to You (copy written in 1935) is still under copy write protection. So if you take your kids to a birthday party at a pizza theater, the restaurant has to pay a fee to cover the guy in the mouse suit singing happy birthday. That's why some restaurants use their own birthday sons.
From wiki:
Royalty amounts sought
The Walt Disney Company paid the copyright holder U.S. $5,000 to use the song in the birthday scene of the defunct Epcot attraction Horizons.[citation needed]
The documentary film The Corporation claims that Warner/Chappell charges up to U.S. $10,000 for the song to appear in a film. Because of the copyright issue, filmmakers rarely show complete singalongs of "Happy Birthday" in films, either substituting the public-domain "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" or avoiding the song entirely. Before the song was copyrighted it was used freely, as in Bosko's Party, a Warner Brothers cartoon of 1932, where a chorus of animals sings it twice through. The entire song is performed in tribute to the title character of Batman Begins, a Warner Brothers film.
In the 1987 documentary Eyes on the Prize about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., there was a birthday party scene in which Dr. King's discouragement began to lift. After its initial release, the film was unavailable for sale or broadcast for many years because of the cost of clearing many copyrights, of which "Happy Birthday to You" was one. Grants in 2005 for copyright clearances [12] have allowed PBS to rebroadcast the film as recently as February 2008.[13]
Many restaurants have original, modern, corporate-developed songs that are used instead of the old-fashioned "Happy Birthday to You" when serving patrons the traditional cake on their birthdays. Originally, these songs were specifically developed to prevent copyright infringement and having to pay royalties. In Mike Jittlov's 1989 film The Wizard of Speed and Time, Jittlov avoided all copyright and royalty problems by using a replacement song, "Merry Birthday to You", which he wrote himself.