Pay for a Happy Birthday

Sorry, no more Happy Birthday for you

Here's an interesting bit of information everyone should know: The song Happy Birthday is copyrighted and owned by Time Warner. Everytime you sing it in a public place, like a restaurant, you're liable to pay royalty fees. Check out UnhappyBirthday.com and this Snopes article.

I quote from UnhappyBirthday.com:

This means that if you sing Happy Birthday to your family at home, you're probably not committing copyright infringment. However, if you do it in an restaurant — and if the restaurant hasn't already worked out a deal with ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) — you may be engaging in copyright infringement.

If you have seen someone singing Happy Birthday in a restaurant, a park, or at a school, you should tell ASCAP so that they can arrange for a license. If you are an offender, you should apologize and offer to pay whatever is due — a nickel, a quarter, a dollar — whatever ASCAP demands.

To think that there're pirates in all the MacDonald's and Hard Rock Cafes all over the world everyday. But now you have the perfect excuse to ask your date home just so you can sing Happy Birthday to her!

Incidentally, I'm now reading Nick Hornby's About A Boy, and it's about a thirty-something man who never had to work because his grandfather wrote a famous Christmas jingle and the royalties kept him rich. If you think about it, songs like Happy Birthday and We Wish You A Merry Christmas are so simple, yet people never get sick of them. If you can write one as catchy and popular, you'll never have to work for the rest of your life!