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!

Comments

Lunch Bytes: 05

With all that we are gifted from the open resources community, how can we contribute and give back? Fortunately, Creative Commons has provided a tool that both serves the commons and is engaging enough for the end user to pony up. With this, the Web 2.0 Test Kitchen is taking a moment to praise CC and stock the commons with our own content. The List , is a Creative Commons developed application that allows users to snap some pics and directly upload. Under the GNU license, it’s a free program for all. You’ll just need a smartphone that meets the technical requirements. As soon as you install and open the app, you'll see the Creative Commons CC logotype. You're in! Once, the app opens you’ll be prompted as to the current needs of Creative Commons with a request for a specific type of subject matter. For example, “Creative Commons needs a picture of…”. You have the choice to accept, move to the next request, or hit "done". All items selected will fall un...

Lunch Bytes: 03

Since we’re on the topic of Creative Commons this week, the Web 2.0 Test Kitchen will be showing off some free apps that can help you work with content. So, let’s say that you've just downloaded an image(s) from Flickr and you’re ready to remix the content but don’t have a raster graphics editor. You don’t have to shell out $150 for Adobe Photoshop Lightbox or subscribe to their monthly plan whilst contributing to their $4.795B revenue steam. Go to Pixlr, as they offer a free web-based application that meets most of the demands of its pricey equivalent. You can start using Pixlr as soon as you land on the site. This is one of those rare times that I’ve tested an application, where the proprietor does not require you to fill out any forms to get started or to receive your file. There are two accessible releases on the site. The Express version allows you to do simple alterations, resizing, overlays, and add borders while the Editor flavor of the app allows you to complete more...

Lunch Bytes: 04

I’d like to introduce you to another “freebie for the people” resource. Imagine that you’ve created a first-rate multimedia asset, more specifically, a video or podcast. The video has excellent narration, transitions, titling, or the podcast has clear vocals, but you’re missing that special something. What could it be? You know it! It's the emotive and compelling sound of music. In today’s Web 2.0 Test Kitchen, we’re tuning-in to a music repository for your awesome eLearning digital media. Finding music that is free of copyright constraints and in an immediately accessible format can be a daunting task. Fear not, the Free Music Archive is here to help us out. You can search this vast library of .mp3s that have been curated by actual music mavens that work in the industry. This is where you can find just about any score for your video or podcast, and hold the attention of your audience. Don’t know where to start? You can filter your searches by curators, genres, and how ...

Web 2.0 Test Kitchen

Search This Blog