Copyrights
I found this weeks class discussion to be very interesting. Prior to this week, I didn’t fully understand what the difference between a patent, trademark, copyright, and public domain was. All I knew is that when I started my business a few years ago that I was advised to get my logo and name of my business trademarked, so people couldn’t use it without a real explanation of what those things were. Although I may add that I should have looked it up for myself. The one thing that stuck out the most to me about this discussion were copyrights, and how they only grant temporary ownership to the creator. I found it interesting that there was a copyright on the “Happy Birthday” song primarily because it is a song that is sang somewhere around the world everyday along with a number of other songs. There is no real way to police who sings the “Happy Birthday” song. This made me wonder if prior to Jennifer Nelson making the documentary called “Happy Birthday” did anyone question having to pay $1500 to use the song or bother to do proper research on where the song came from. Warner/Chappell knew that they were scamming people over for their money which is why they initially hesitant to turn over the documents to assist with the court case. When the song was published it was the only song amongst the other songs that were published along with it that was not copyrighted instead it read, “Special permission through courtesy of The Clayton F. Summy Co.” According to documents from the case when they did finally turn them over, that line was,”blurred almost beyond legibility.” They were trying to hide it in order to get away with not disclosing that piece of information because that was literally the smoking gun that stood in between them being able to still charge people to use the song when the whole time it should have been a part of the public domain.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/filmmakers-fighting-happy-birthday-copyright-find-their-smoking-gun/
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