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Birthday Cake and Maybe a Song

My Birthday Cake 2017 by Dark Dwarf is licensed under CC by 2.0

It’s been another year and you’re ready to celebrate. You’re fortunate enough to enjoy good times with friends and family. You stand around a cake with candles alit and the scene is festive. But before we cue up for the harmony, we may want to seek out a lawyer. Here, in the Web 2.0 Kitchen, we’re liable to learn something about intellectual property and copyright. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

Ever go to a franchised chain restaurant and hear the staff sing someone Happy Birthday? It’s some brand spun song and sounds nothing like what you usually hear with family, friends, or at the office (basically in private). The Happy Birthday song, as we know it, has been protected from infringement for quite some time.  The consequences are shelling out bags of cash in the form of royalties to the holders of the copyright.

The Happy Birthday song has been in the hands of Warner/Chappell for years. In the process of acquiring other music labels, they assumed the exclusive rights on thousands of songs. The Happy Birthday song just so happened to be one of them. This is quite a gem, as they have basically forced the market to avoid the cheerful little ballad or pay for licensing rights to use. Any unauthorized application of their property in films, commercials, music, restaurants, etc. was basis for an immediate lawsuit.

Due to some legal issues that they needed to sort out, the Happy Birthday song’s copyright has expired. The short playful jingle is now available in the public domain, which means it is available to the people. So, next time you’re ready to sing Happy Birthday, no need to look around, it‘s free for us to use.

So, while I was looking for the birthday cake image for this post, I realized it was a learning moment to apply best practices for attribution. An attribution should have title, author, source and license as evidenced by the caption for the image above. Sometimes, we're unable to fill in all the blanks but we'll just have to do our best. The Creative Commons Wiki describes it succinctly.

I hope this short and sweet ditty shed a little light!

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