Nelson had to pay only $1,500 to license the song - and even a big Hollywood blockbuster would have to pay no more than $25,000 to $30,000 to use it, he said. It would lose that funding if the court decides Happy Birthday belongs to everyone.īrauneis said that producers and directors haven't challenged Warner/Chappell's copyright before because it is not worth the expense.
Now known as the Association for Childhood Education International, it collected $619,990 in royalties in 2011, according to its federal tax report, which was about one-third of its revenue. In 1988, Warner Communications, as it was then known, acquired the title - along with about 50,000 other songs - in a $25 million deal, and its successor, Warner/Chappell, collects licensing fees each year, which it shares with an organization founded in 1892, with the support of the Hills, called the International Kindergarten Union. The Summy Co., which published Song Stories for Children, won a copyright in the 1930s for the Happy Birthday lyrics put to Mildred's melody, but Brauneis said it was only for arrangements written by two of its employees. The Hill family and its foundation eventually filed four suits challenging the unlicensed use of Happy Birthday, including one against Berlin and Hart and another that contested the song's use in singing telegrams - including the first ever sent.īut none of the suits produced a verdict on the song's authorship or ownership. "I was never a money grubber," Patty said, explaining she was more interested in education.īrauneis said his research shows that while Happy Birthday probably was first sung in Louisville, the lyrics developed informally and nobody can rightly claim them.Īs Rivkin put it, "It is kind of a folk song that just sort of happened."Ī plaque erected in in Louisville in 2002 says that "local history recounts" that Patty Hill suggested during a birthday party for a girl named Lisette Hast in the Little Loomhouse in the Kenwood-Iroquois neighborhood that the words "good morning to all" be changed to "happy birthday to you."īut Brauneis said there is no documentation for that story. Using the same melody, children at Louisville Experimental Kindergarten School would sing Good Bye to You, Happy Vacation to You and - with every birthday celebration - Happy Birthday to You, Patty said in the deposition.īut on cross-examination, she admitted that the sisters never published or copyrighted the lyrics to Happy Birthday - not even as the song grew increasingly popular over the next two decades from coast to coast.
The sisters published Good Morning in 1893 in a book of sheet music called Song Stories for Children, which they copyrighted and exhibited that year at the World's Fair in Chicago. Patty said that Mildred would work on the score each night in the family's Louisville home and the next day she would try it out with her pupils, until they finally came up with a version that "even the youngest children could learn with perfect ease." "She was the musician and I was, if it is not using too pretentious a word, the poetess," Patty said in a deposition in a suit filed in 1934 by their younger sister Jessica against renowned composer Irving Berlin, playwright Moss Hart and the producers of a Broadway musical that allegedly featured Happy Birthday without a license. There is little dispute that in the 1890s the Hill sisters wrote the precursor to Happy Birthday, a song for Patty's kindergarten students they called Good Morning to All and which featured the same melody. George Washington University law school professor Robert Brauneis, who may be the world's leading scholar on Happy Birthday, says Warner can only win if it proves that Mildred and Patty Hill wrote the song.Īnd Brauneis, who spent two years researching its copyright, said that while both were remarkable women - Mildred was later a renowned musicologist and Patty an esteemed professor at Columbia University Teachers College - there is "scant" evidence that they did. If Warner/Chappell Music prevails, it will be able to continue collecting fees until 2030, when the disputed copyright expires, from anyone who wants to publicly perform the song or use it on television or in movies. James Steven, a spokesman for Warner Music Group, which owns the music publisher, said the company doesn't comment on pending litigation. Nelson's lawyers say they have "irrefutable documentary evidence, some dating to 1893," showing that if Warner/Chappell owns the right to anything, it is only to a couple of long-forgotten piano arrangements for Happy Birthday published in 1935. The sisters have no surviving family members. Happy Birthday generates an estimated $2 million a year in licensing fees, part of which goes to a children's education organization designated by the Hill family.
One of Nelson's lawyers, Mark Rivkin, said as Nelson did more and more research on the song's roots, "she got madder and madder and madder."
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