Just who are the real copyright thieves?
This past December, a lengthy legal dispute over the rights to one of the most famous songs in the world finally ended after a US federal judge ruled that the “Happy Birthday” song is in the public domain. And on Tuesday, a court decided that its publisher, Warner/Chappell, has been illegally charging large amounts of money for its use over the decades, threatening any infringement with costly legal action. The film and record company will now have to pay out $14 million in a class action suit to the companies who were wrongly charged for using the song.
The court case was brought by a film director making a documentary about the song, which has been earning Warner/Chappell more than $2 million a year since 1988.
It would seem that Warner/Chappell and Happy Birthday is far from being the only such case where copyright law has been twisted to the benefit of large multinationals or minor individuals. In Spain, there are any number cases where people have registered songs as their own when they were clearly in the public domain, earning them substantial royalties. Warner/Chappell and Happy Birthday would seem to be the tip of the iceberg.
Call it poetic justice or call it irony: let’s not forget that Warner has been caught doing exactly what it has accused the general public of for so long. And of course the real difference between the US multinational’s behavior and somebody who downloads a movie from a P2P site is that the latter is doing so simply for their own consumption, and there is no attempt to make money out of it — what’s more, unlicensed downloading diminishes when people are able to access movies and music cheaply and easily. The same cannot be said of Warner Bros, which has clearly stolen something from the public domain with the express intention of making money out of it. Whichever way you look at it, Warner Bros was committing a crime, and now it’s been busted.
Which is the more serious of the two? Somebody who because of the difficulties involved in accessing a movie because the entertainment industry can’t be bothered to make it available easily and cheaply decides to download it without paying; or is it more outrageous for a bunch of professional thieves to take works from the public domain, register them as their own, and set up a business to charge people for using them?
In the first case, we’re talking largely about supply and demand and distribution channels. In the second, a business based on lying and cheating. Who are the thieves here, and who is robbing who?
(En español, aquí)
