Well, in the USA one cannot copyright the design of letters. But there really isn’t much else that cannot be copyrighted; (with the exception of stuff covered by patents, and I’m not even going to get into that crazy mess) at best there are circumstances (such as fair use in the USA) that exempt items from copyright, both.

It’s easy to find out more about this pernicious-sounding nonsese by googling for “happy birthday” +song +copyright. As I would expect the first hit is a page at Snopes and the second hit is a Wikipedia article.

Snopes says the Happy Birthday song is copyrighted, but much of the material at Snopes I don’t take seriously. Its writer Barbara V. Mikelson is an amateur skeptic who makes many mistakes with sloppy ad hoc - pro hoc logic, slipshod rationale and unreliable sources.

The Wikipedia article contains unverified claims and many statements for which editors have requested citations which have yet to be supplied by the editors who added those statements (at Wikipedia the burden of proof rests with the person adding the material). So the material there is not reliable and some of the sources have not been verified or are not even verifiable, so it cannot be relied upon. It seems that somebody claims to own the copyright to the song but this claim is disputed:

“Many question the validity of the current copyright, as the melody of the song was most likely borrowed from other popular songs of the time, and the lyrics were improvised by a group of five and six-year-old children who never received any compensation.[10] The song is currently set to pass in to the public domain in 2030.”

Read the whole article there and I soon reach the conclusion the words to this song were in the public domain long before the twerp who filed copyright for it made their claim. The Disney company paid that enitity a $5000 fee for the right to use the song in its Epcot Center. But Disney do some incredibly stupid things, and just because they coughed up for it once does not in itself validate the copyright holder’s claim.

In summary, this entity’s claim to own the copyright for the words to Happy Birthday is a load of shite based on a false claim. If I planned to use the song in a film, a TV or radio commercial and this “owner” showed up and hassled me for fees, claiming ownership of the words to the song, I would tell them to “sue me”, then watch as the courts reject their dubious claim and throw the case out of the system because it has “no merit”. I wouldn’t bother trying to get money from them out-of-court to compensate me for disruption to my business because they likely wouldn’t cough up out of court, since they’re out to make money not give it away.

@Puckett: Well, in the USA one cannot copyright the design of letters.

Incorrect, you can so copyright the design of letters in the U.S.A. Haven’t you read Thomas Phinney’s court summary judgements of Adobe versus SSI?

But there really isn’t much else that cannot be copyrighted;

Incorrect. There is lots of material that cannot be copyrighted because it is already in the public domain. Anyone attempting to copyright that stuff would be makinga false claim. The Happy Birthday song is one example. All material produced and published by the United States government and its numerous departments is copyright-free too. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

...at best there are circumstances (such as fair use in the USA) that exempt items from copyright, both.

Fair Use does not exempt individual items from copyright. Fair Use only allows use of 10 percent or a work’s material “for the purposes of education, criticism or review”. To say that some “circumstances exempt items from copyright” is inacurate, incomplete and potentially misleading.

j a m e s