Today I Learned
What did you learn today? Share it with us!
We learn something new every day. This is a community dedicated to informing each other and helping to spread knowledge.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with TIL. Linking to a source of info is optional, but highly recommended as it helps to spark discussion.
** Posts must be about an actual fact that you have learned, but it doesn't matter if you learned it today. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.**
Rule 2- Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your post subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-TIL posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-TIL posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Partnered Communities
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Wellllllllll
It actually wasn't, but someone claimed it was, and would sue people who used it. Most would settle and agree not to use it. This is also why most chain restaurants had their own alternative birthday songs.
It was only that in 2016 somebody actually said to them "prove it" and took them to court, which found their copyright claim to be without merit.
Incidentally, there is no penalty for this.
It was not copyrighted until 2016. Seeing as it's from the 1800s, that would not be possible.
What day is today?
It's Nibbler's birthday!
What a day for a birthday.
Let's all have some cake!
And you smell like one too!
that Futurama DVD commentary is where I learnt that Happy Birthday was Copyrighted
I always thought this is why Olive Garden, Red Lobster, whatever 80s/90s fad chain restaurant sang their own birthday songs for patrons.
Happy happy birthday.. It’s your special day.. happy happy birthday That’s why we’re here to say HEY! Happy happy birthday may alll your dreams come true happy happy birthday from Bennigans to you..HEY!
That's what I heard about Chevy's, too.
There was a long running TV Trope caused by shows not wanting to license happy birthday.
Scene starts
🎶 tooo yooouuu! 🎶
I never would have thought this is a legit way of circumventing copyright. Holy shit.
30 Rock did it the other way around while also poking fun at the trope itself
Crazy ! I didn’t know that
I remember a bunch of Yout×be videos being taken down due to people singing it. So stupid..
Which was obviously bullshit (that they were given a copyright). The 2016 date is how long it took for some group to take the time and effort to get it thrown out finally.
So it's a bit more complicated than that.
I believe it was Warner Brothers who held the copyright but it had been disputed whether they actually owned the rights. But it's one of those situations where taking them to court to find out was going to cost a lot more than paying the license.
WB didn't have to prove they owned it to get people to pay. They only needed to show that they held the copyright to it and the history of other people paying did the rest. Sort of like paying protection to a local mob.
So when WB finally got sued and they had to show receipts, the judge decided against them and we got something in the public domain.
A good write up here: https://time.com/3976577/happy-birthday-copyright-history/
I don't feel like reading atm, can I get a link to a LegalEagle vid about it?
the very idea of a regular birthday party wasn’t really widespread before the era
Can we go back to that? I hate birthdays.
Wow, it hit public domain THAT long ago?
Actually it hit public domain way before that, but it went to court in 2016. I remember it was pretty big fucking deal. Because it was public domain in freaking 90's. Whoever held copyright never updated it, yet no one was aware of it until someone went to court to challenge the copyright.
Happy Birthday Lisa is better anyway.
Yeah man i remember being on a shoot shortly after and when we had a birthday sequence we all discussed whether or not we should use the actual birthday song because we kind of couldn’t believe it had been made public again. We opted not to use it out of an abundance of caution lol
Stevie Wonder version is superior anyways
Aaron Sorkin's criminally-underappreciated "Sports Night" had a subplot about this.
Am I the only one that kinda hates birthday songs?
Can we start a tradition where we write poems as preparation for the birthday then read it in place of the birthday song?
(Also please do not blow on the cake, so much saliva and germs. I didn't eat the cake at the last birthday celebration I attended to because I was kinda germaphobic. Oh well, I hope others enjoyed it 🤷♂️)