In April 2004, a group of Swarthmore students got politicized when they were threatened with copyright lawsuits for posting a leaked whistleblower memo that documented Diebold’s voting machine malfeasance. They founded the Free Culture movement, which is now a honest-to-goodness global phenom at campuses all over the planet.
As a birthday celebration, the Creative Commons folks have gotten copyfighters around to the world to sing Happy Birthday — a song that is, incredibly, still in copyright and controlled by Warners — created a techno-mix, and posted it.
Creative Commons wanted to find an appropriate way to celebrate. So we put together this version of “Happy Birthday,” sung by, we might say, some of the leaders of the free world (The EFF Staff, Mitch Kapor, Dan Gillmor, Brian Behlendorf, Ian Clarke, Jimmy Wales, Brewster Kahle, and Gigi Sohn). Of course, to do this, we had to license the rights from Harry Fox (who represent Warner Chappell Music, the copyright owner of the composition) – yes, “Happy Birthday” is still under copyright – but the folks at Harry Fox were willing to give us a pretty good deal. Unfortunately, that deal does not transfer, so while you’re free to download this version and play it “for personal use”, and free to engage in any “fair use” of the song, the rights we have to give don’t include much more than that.
(via Lessig)