Since copyright is so easy to obtain now, it is hard to know when you might be trespassing on someone else's Intellectual Property! Thank you for the fun "heads up"!

Chili's restaurants may think they're getting around paying royalties by not singing the classic 'Happy Birthday' song to their customers... but the song they *are* using ("Happy happy birthday/from all of us to you...)belongs to Disney; it's from their movie "The Emperor's New Groove." And if there's one thing you don't want to do, it's tangle with Disney lawyers!

Did you pay for the rights to play Happy Birthday at the end of the story or was that fair use?

So a song written in 1893 will be copyrighted until 2030? That makes sense. Yay corporations!

"All the Hill sisters cared about was sheet music pirates."

All the Hill sisters cared about was the dominant "pirate" technology for reproducing, distributing, and performing the music they created. All they cared about was reproducing, distributing, and performing the music they created *without* their consent and *without* earning them any revenues. The Hill sisters didn't confine their anti-piracy efforts to some obscure, backwater reproduction technology.

I applaud your article. I so wish someone would step up and end the tyranny of the unreasonable Happy Birthday claim and free it for the world!