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But in 1909 the US extended the term of the extension, then extended it again in 1976 and again in 1998.Įvery one of those extensions was retrospective, right up to the present 67 years, making a total of 95. The initial term was 28 years, with an extension of 14 years on application. Back in those days authors had to register to stake a claim. Initially named "Good Morning to All", they published it in a 1894 book called Song Stories for the Kindergarten.īy rights it ought to be long out of copyright, if it was ever in it. Somewhere in the late 1880s they achieved something remarkable: a song that fitted the limited vocal range of children yet was meaningful, a bit like Kookaburra. They tried out their compositions on Patty's students. Just like Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, wrongly listed in the Angus and Robertson All-time Favourite Australian Song Book as "traditional", Happy Birthday was actually composed by a person: two people in fact, Patty and Mildred Hill – one of them a teacher, the other a musicologist. One of them is that the world's favourite composition was a composition. The answers are spilling out in a US court case which is exposing how murky and fear-ridden the world of copyright really is. How can it be that a tune almost universally regarded as public property is still be in copyright 121 years after it was composed? Especially given that at the time the initial term of copyright was 28 years. That's a private rather than a public performance.