After reading Robert Brauneis's paper, I get the impression that Time Warner doesn't really have rights to the song but that the ASCAP uses fear, uncertainty and doubt to extort royalties for it anyway.
But Good Morning to All is in public domain, so maybe we'll just sing that. So maybe it'll go like this * Run into the atrium * Stand by the fancy text about the atrium's dedication * Sing Good Morning to All * Simultaneously distribute flyers to tomorrow's lawyers about why we're singing Good Morning to All instead of Happy Birthday * Potentially eat cake, though I think that will be frowned upon * Go elsewhere for further shenanigans Tom On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 6:14 PM, Ben Finney <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thomas Levine <[email protected]> writes: > > > A free culture party would be awesome. Having it at the law school > > atrium would be more awesome except that it's probably too late to > > rent it and that it doesn't seem that you can rent it > > (http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Sched/roomres.html#TL). > > One event at your celebration should be to draw attention to the > enclosure of culture by proprietary interests > <URL:http://www.unhappybirthday.com/>. > > Perhaps switch to temporarily taking the copyright ownership of that > song seriously, and follow the logic as far as encouraging everyone to > take down the details of anyone who attempts or enables others in > unauthorised public performance of the work to report them to the > copyright authorities. > > It's very easy to see what's wrong with copyright when it restricts > something that's so clearly part of our shared culture. Whenever I've > seen Benjamin Mako Hill engage an audience with that, it's always both > entertained and opened some eyes to the need for reforming the copyright > regime. > > -- > \ “It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of | > `\ certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.” | > _o__) —Bertrand Russell, _Free Thought and Official Propaganda_, 1928 | > Ben Finney > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss > FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
