How Warner Lost the Copyright to Happy Birthday

Until 2016, every restaurant chain that wanted to sing "Happy Birthday" to a customer paid a license fee. Every studio film that used it on screen paid one too. A 2010 documentary was quoted $700 for a single performance. Warner/Chappell, the publisher that owned the song, was pulling in roughly $2 million a year in licensing — on a melody composed by two Kentucky kindergarten teachers in 1893.

The melody was Patty and Mildred Hill's "Good Morning to All," written for Patty's classroom. Somebody, no one is sure who, swapped the words for the birthday lyrics; the new pairing first appeared in print in 1912. Warner/Chappell didn't enter the picture until 1988, when it bought Birch Tree Group for $25 million; "Happy Birthday" alone was valued at $5 million of that price.

Filmmaker Jennifer Nelson kicked the rock over in 2013. She'd paid Warner $1,500 to use the song in a documentary about the song, then sued to get the money back, arguing Warner had no real claim. Her lawyers found the wedge in a 1922 songbook: the lyrics had been printed there with no copyright notice, which under the law of the time meant the lyrics were already in the public domain. Anything Warner had bought in 1988 was the melody and a particular piano arrangement, not the words anyone actually sang.

In September 2015 a federal judge in Los Angeles agreed, in a 43-page opinion, that Warner had never owned the lyrics. The company settled in early 2016 for $14 million, agreed the song was in the public domain, and stopped collecting. The Hill sisters' tune is now free, after roughly a century in which most of the people humming it were technically supposed to have a license.