music
Who Owns the Happy Birthday Song? Nobody - and Warner/Chappell Paid $14 Million to Admit It
In brief
Who owns the Happy Birthday song?
Nobody. It is in the public domain in the United States, and has been since a federal judge declared it so in June 2016. Anyone may sing, record, film, broadcast or sell it without permission or payment.
For twenty-eight years before that, Warner/Chappell Music collected roughly $2 million a year in licence fees for a copyright a court found it had never validly held. When the claim collapsed, the company paid $14 million back. It is the largest and best-documented case of a music publisher charging the public for something it did not own.
The claim that ran for a century
The song has two components, and confusing them is what allowed the claim to survive as long as it did. Copyright in a song is not one thing; it attaches separately to the music, to the words, and to any sufficiently original arrangement.
Figure
Three separable rights in one short song
The melody
Written 1893
Composed by Mildred J. Hill for a kindergarten song called "Good Morning to All". Long out of copyright and uncontested - even Warner/Chappell never claimed the tune itself.
The words
Origin uncertain
The birthday lyric, attributed to Patty Smith Hill. This is the only piece Warner/Chappell claimed - and the piece the court held it had never proved it acquired.
The arrangement
Registered 1935
A specific piano arrangement published by the Clayton F. Summy Company. Real, valid - and far narrower than the licensing business built on top of it.
The entire dispute turned on whether a 1935 registration covering an arrangement also covered the words. The court found it did not.
How it happened, in order
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1893 | Sisters Mildred J. Hill and Patty Smith Hill publish "Good Morning to All" in a kindergarten songbook issued by the Clayton F. Summy Company. The melody is the one everyone now sings. |
| 1900s-1920s | The birthday words appear in print repeatedly, without a copyright notice and without anyone claiming them. Under the law of the time, that is a serious problem for a later claimant. |
| 1935 | Summy Co. obtains federal registrations, including the one catalogued as E51990, which Warner/Chappell would later treat as the foundation of its rights in the lyrics. |
| 1988 | Warner acquires the Birch Tree Group, Summy's corporate successor, for a reported $25 million - a price driven largely by this one song. |
| 1988-2015 | Warner/Chappell licenses the song to films, television and advertising, reporting roughly $2 million a year in royalties. It asserts the copyright runs to 2030. |
| 2013 | Filmmaker Jennifer Nelson, having paid $1,500 to use the song in a documentary about the song, sues. Musician Rupa Marya joins; the case becomes a class action. |
| 22 Sept 2015 | Judge George H. King of the Central District of California rules that Warner/Chappell never held a valid copyright in the lyrics. The 1935 registration covered a piano arrangement, not the words. |
| June 2016 | Judge King approves a $14 million settlement and enters judgment declaring the song to be in the public domain. |
Sources: the court record in Marya v. Warner/Chappell Music, and contemporaneous reporting of the ruling and settlement. hollywoodreporter.com · wipo.int
The filmmaker who broke the copyright was making a documentary about the copyright. She had paid $1,500 for the licence.
The document that decided it
The case was not won on a grand principle. It was won on a piece of paper.
Warner/Chappell's chain of title depended on the Hill sisters having transferred rights in the birthday words to Summy Co., and on the 1935 registration having covered those words. The plaintiffs' lawyers pursued the underlying documents through discovery and eventually surfaced a 1927 songbook - initially produced in a blurred copy - in which the lyrics appeared without any copyright notice.
Under the Copyright Act as it then stood, publication without notice pushed a work into the public domain. And Judge King found that even setting that aside, Warner/Chappell could not show that the Hills had ever assigned the rights in the words at all. The 1935 registration was for a particular arrangement by a named arranger. It did not, and could not, reach back and capture a lyric published decades earlier by other hands.
The ruling did not say the words had entered the public domain in 2015. It said Warner/Chappell had never owned them. Everything collected since 1988 had been collected on a claim that did not exist. americanbar.org
The economics of a copyright that was not there
What the claim was worth, in US$ millions
The $25m figure is the reported price Warner paid for the Birch Tree Group in 1988, of which this song was the principal asset. The $2m is the approximate annual royalty take reported during the claim's operation. The $14m settlement covered refunds to those who had paid licence fees, plus fees and costs. Royalties are annual; the other two are one-off.
Read together, those three bars describe something unusual. Over twenty-eight years, an asset bought for $25 million returned somewhere in the region of $50 million in fees, and the eventual cost of being wrong was $14 million. That asymmetry is the point. A publisher asserting a doubtful copyright faces a rational calculation: the licence fees arrive continuously, and the cost of a successful challenge arrives once, years later, discounted, and only if somebody with the resources to litigate decides to bother.
Very few potential challengers had that incentive. A film production facing a $1,500 licence fee will always pay it rather than spend six figures on a declaratory judgment. That is why the claim survived for a century - not because it was strong, but because it was individually cheaper to obey than to test.
The claim survived because it was cheaper to pay than to challenge. That is a business model, not a copyright.
What you can and cannot do now
Free to do
Perform it: in public, commercially, in a restaurant, on stage, on air.
Film it: in a feature, a documentary, an advertisement, without clearance.
Record and sell it: your own new recording, with no publishing licence required in the US.
Still restricted
Someone else's recording: the sound recording is separately owned. You cannot lift a existing track.
A specific arrangement: an original modern arrangement can carry its own copyright.
Outside the US: the judgment binds American law. Other territories reached their own conclusions on their own timetables.
That first restriction is the one that trips people up. The composition is free; a particular performance of it is not. Using Marilyn Monroe's 1962 rendition, or any other released recording, still requires clearance from whoever owns that master - which is exactly the master-versus-composition distinction that runs through every music ownership question.
What it changed
The case did not stay an isolated curiosity. The same legal team went on to challenge other long-asserted claims over songs of contested provenance, most prominently "We Shall Overcome", where a 2017 ruling similarly found key verses unprotected. The pattern is consistent: songs that emerged from communal or institutional settings, later registered by a publisher, and licensed for decades on the strength of a registration nobody examined closely.
For anyone researching who owns a piece of music, the lesson is procedural rather than moral. A copyright registration is a claim, not a proof. It records what somebody asserted on a form. Whether the assertion was true depends on a chain of transfers that, in this case, nobody checked for a hundred years.
Frequently asked questions
Is Happy Birthday free to use now?
In the United States, yes. A federal court declared the song to be in the public domain in June 2016. No permission or payment is required to perform, film or record it.
Why did restaurants sing their own birthday songs?
Because chains took the licensing claim seriously and wrote around it. Those alternative jingles are a direct artefact of a copyright that a court later found had never existed.
Who wrote Happy Birthday?
The melody was written by Mildred J. Hill in 1893 for "Good Morning to All". The birthday words are attributed to her sister Patty Smith Hill, but the court found no evidence of when they were written or that the rights were ever assigned.
How much did Warner/Chappell make from it?
Roughly $2 million a year in royalties over the period it asserted the claim, on figures reported at the time. It paid $14 million to settle the class action in 2016.
Did Warner/Chappell have to refund everyone?
The $14 million settlement fund compensated class members who had paid licence fees, alongside legal fees and costs. It was not a full historical refund of everything ever collected.
Is it public domain outside the United States?
The 2016 judgment is a US ruling and does not bind foreign courts. Other territories apply their own terms, generally measured from the authors' deaths, and reached the public domain on their own schedules. Check the specific jurisdiction before relying on it.
Key takeaways
The bottom line
- Nobody owns "Happy Birthday to You" in the United States. It has been in the public domain since a court judgment in June 2016.
- The melody dates to an 1893 kindergarten song and was never seriously claimed. Only the words were ever in dispute.
- Warner/Chappell's claim rested on a 1935 registration that the court found covered a piano arrangement, not the lyrics.
- The ruling did not end the copyright - it found that Warner/Chappell had never validly held one.
- Roughly $2 million a year was collected for twenty-eight years; the eventual settlement was $14 million.
- The composition is free, but an existing sound recording of it is separately owned and still requires clearance.
Final word
The most valuable copyright in popular music turned out not to be a copyright at all. It was a registration nobody had reason to question, attached to an asset nobody could afford to litigate over - which is a fair description of a good deal of what passes for ownership in the music business.