Happy Birthday!

I learned recently that Time-Warner has the copyright to the song "Happy Birthday to You". Technically, they can sue you if you sing it publicly.

This has got to be the most memorable song everyone sing, every year, since their first birthday. Why is there even a copyright on such a happy song? Because TW reportedly receive around 2 million dollars in royalties, evey year. It can cost several thousand dollars to use the song in a movie. And the suing thing was not even a joke - though they were covered in shame for doing so, some smartass somewhere thought it was worthwhile to sue a group of camping scout girls.

I really need to know what they were thinking, if they really thought they could get a lot of money out of this, and who approved the action. After the media coverage, they apparently settled for a symbolic 1 cent (if I remember correctly?), but the intent was there from the beginning.

Companies like this are the ones that we should boycott, but how exactly can we do that? TW owns New Line Cinema, Time inc, and HBO, along with a dozen other subsidiaries. That's pretty big. We can boycott companies like Sony in favor of Samsung, for example, but if I want to boycott New Line Cinema, I'll notice pretty quickly that no other film studio has another version of the Lord of the Rings.

So I guess my question would be: why the *fuck* isn't Time-Warner giving this song back to the public domain, where it belongs? Yeah, yeah... Money...