On two previous occasions (see https://www.gurwinskeyboard.com/happy-birthday-to-you-feel-free-to-sing-along/ and https://www.gurwinskeyboard.com/happy-birthday-us-court-rules-happy-birthday-public-domain/) , I wrote about the court battle and decision regarding the copyright status of the lyrics to the song, Happy Birthday to You. As noted in my September 2015 post, the U.S. District Court in California ruled that mega-publisher, Warner/Chappell Music, which had claimed to own the copyright to the song and had been charging royalties for the use of the song, did not own any rights to the song. The court held that Warner/Chappell had never actually owned the copyright to the song. The judge said there was no proof that the song’s original authors, sisters Mildred and Patty Hill, had ever validly assigned their rights to the song to Warner/Chappell.
Two months after the District Court’s decision, another party, the Association for Childhood Education International (“ACEI”), filed a suit claiming to be the rightful owner of the copyright to the birthday party standard. Most lawyers and observers assumed that the District Court’s ruling also meant that the lyrics were now in the public domain. However, a careful reading of that case reveals that the court didn’t explicitly state that: the court merely said there had been no transfer of 
rights and that some person or company theoretically could still claim the rights to the song. ACEI, a charity founded by the late Patty Hill, moved to intervene in the case against Warner/Chappell, claiming that IT was the rightful legal heir to the late authors’ rights in the suddenly unowned copyrights. ACEI’s argument was that if Patty Hill never assigned any rights to Warner/Chappell and its predecessors, she likely died possessing all the copyrights to Happy Birthday to You. Those rights would have then descended to her daughter, Jessica Hill, who in turn bequeathed all of her holdings to ACEI. ACEI stated in its filing that “Until [the District Court’s] ruling, [ACEI] reasonably believed [Warner/Chappell] possessed valid copyrights to the Happy Birthday lyrics — an assumption the parties have operated under since [1992].” Bolstering this argument of its claimed historical rights to the song is the fact that Warner/Chappell had been paying ACEI one-third of the royalties that Warner/Chappell had collected from users of Happy Birthday to You.
In the original case (which was filed by a documentary filmmaker who refused to pay the licensing fees to Warner/Chappell), the plaintiffs had only sought to recover licensing fees paid since 2009. However, the plaintiffs later moved to vastly expand the relief sought, claiming that information learned during the discovery process for the case led them to believe that Warner/Chappell had concealed certain evidence. They argued that the members of the class action lawsuit should be enlarged to cover any one who paid licensing fees for the right to use Happy Birthday to You all the way back to 1949. This month, the District Court ruled further on the case, holding that plaintiffs (the parties who had been charged millions in royalties by Warner/Chappell to use the song) could seek damages going all the way back to 1949 since it never owned the copyright to the song and, therefore, never had a legal right to charge users of the song.
Against this complicated and multi-party litigation backdrop, the lawsuit now has been settled. The settlement, announced in a court filing last Wednesday, involves all three sides of the case — Warner/Chappell, the filmmaker plaintiffs who sued originally, and ACEI, which claimed to rightfully own the song. Thus far, the financial details and other aspects of the settlement have not been made public. However, various sources have reported that, as part of the settlement, the song will be in the public domain. That means it will be free for all to use without fear of a lawsuit.
