Git 2.5 Release Notes ===================== Updates since v2.4 —————— UI, Workflows & Features * The bash completion script (in contrib/) learned a few options that “git revert” takes. * Whitespace breakages in deleted and context lines can also be painted in the output of “git diff” and friends with the new –ws-error-highlight option. * List of commands shown by “git help” are grouped along the workflow elements to help early learners. * “git p4” now detects the filetype (e.g. binary) correctly even when the files are opened exclusively. * git p4 attempts to better handle branches in Perforce. * “git p4” learned “–changes-block-size ” to read the changes in chunks from Perforce, instead of making one call to “p4 changes” that may trigger “too many rows scanned” error from Perforce. * More workaround for Perforce’s row number limit in “git p4”. * Unlike “$EDITOR” and “$GIT_EDITOR” that can hold the path to the command and initial options (e.g. “/path/to/emacs -nw”), ‘git p4’ did not let the shell interpolate the contents of the environment variable that name the editor “$P4EDITOR” (and “$EDITOR”, too). This release makes it in line with the rest of Git, as well as with Perforce. * A new short-hand @{push} denotes the remote-tracking branch that tracks the branch at the remote the would be pushed to. * “git show-branch –topics HEAD” (with no other arguments) did not do anything interesting. Instead, contrast the given revision against all the local branches by default. * A replacement for contrib/workdir/git-new-workdir that does not rely on symbolic links and make sharing of objects and refs safer by making the borrowee and borrowers aware of each other. Consider this as still an experimental feature; its UI is still likely to change. * Tweak the sample “store” backend of the credential helper to honor XDG configuration file locations when specified. * A heuristic we use to catch mistyped paths on the command line “git ” is to make sure that all the non-rev parameters in the later part of the command line are names of the files in the working tree, but that means “git grep $str — *.c” must always be disambiguated with “–“, because nobody sane will create a file whose name literally is asterisk-dot-see. Loosen the heuristic to declare that with a wildcard string the user likely meant to give us a pathspec. * “git merge FETCH_HEAD” learned that the previous “git fetch” could be to create an Octopus merge, i.e. recording multiple branches that are not marked as “not-for-merge”; this allows us to lose an old style invocation “git merge HEAD $commits…” in the implementation of “git pull” script; the old style syntax can now be deprecated (but not removed yet). * Filter scripts were run with SIGPIPE disabled on the Git side, expecting that they may not read what Git feeds them to filter. We however treated a filter that does not read its input fully before exiting as an error. We no longer do and ignore EPIPE when writing to feed the filter scripts. This changes semantics, but arguably in a good way. If a filter can produce its output without fully consuming its input using whatever magic, we now let it do so, instead of diagnosing it as a programming error. * Instead of dying immediately upon failing to obtain a lock, the locking (of refs etc) retries after a short while with backoff. * Introduce http..SSLCipherList configuration variable to tweak the list of cipher suite to be used with libcURL when talking with https:// sites. * “git subtree” script (in contrib/) used “echo -n” to produce progress messages in a non-portable way. * “git subtree” script (in contrib/) does not have –squash option when pushing, but the documentation and help text pretended as if it did. * The Git subcommand completion (in contrib/) no longer lists credential helpers among candidates; they are not something the end user would invoke interactively. * The index file can be taught with “update-index –untracked-cache” to optionally remember already seen untracked files, in order to speed up “git status” in a working tree with tons of cruft. * “git mergetool” learned to drive WinMerge as a backend. * “git upload-pack” that serves “git fetch” can be told to serve commits that are not at the tip of any ref, as long as they are reachable from a ref, with uploadpack.allowReachableSHA1InWant configuration variable. * “git cat-file –batch(-check)” learned the “–follow-symlinks” option that follows an in-tree symbolic link when asked about an object via extended SHA-1 syntax, e.g. HEAD:RelNotes that points at Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt. With the new option, the command behaves as if HEAD:Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt was given as input instead. Consider this as still an experimental and incomplete feature: – We may want to do the same for in-index objects, e.g. asking for :RelNotes with this option should give :Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt, too – “git cat-file –follow-symlinks blob HEAD:RelNotes” may also be something we want to allow in the future. * “git send-email” learned the alias file format used by the sendmail program (in a simplified form; we obviously do not feed pipes). * Traditionally, external low-level 3-way merge drivers are expected to produce their results based solely on the contents of the three variants given in temporary files named by %O, %A and %B on their command line. Additionally allow them to look at the final path (given by %P). * “git blame” learned blame.showEmail configuration variable. * “git apply” cannot diagnose a patch corruption when the breakage is to mark the length of the hunk shorter than it really is on the hunk header line “@@ -l,k +m,n @@”; one special case it could is when the hunk becomes no-op (e.g. k == n == 2 for two-line context patch output), and it learned to do so in this special case. * Add the “–allow-unknown-type” option to “cat-file” to allow inspecting loose objects of an experimental or a broken type. * Many long-running operations show progress eye-candy, even when they are later backgrounded. Hide the eye-candy when the process is sent to the background instead. (merge a4fb76c lm/squelch-bg-progress later to maint). Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc. * “unsigned char [20]” used throughout the code to represent object names are being converted into a semi-opaque “struct object_id”. This effort is expected to interfere with other topics in flight, but hopefully will give us one extra level of abstraction in the end, when completed. * for_each_ref() callback functions were taught to name the objects not with “unsigned char sha1[20]” but with “struct object_id”. * Catch a programmer mistake to feed a pointer not an array to ARRAY_SIZE() macro, by using a couple of GCC extensions. * Some error messages in “git config” were emitted without calling the usual error() facility. * When “add–interactive” splits a hunk into two overlapping hunks and then let the user choose only one, it sometimes feeds an incorrect patch text to “git apply”. Add tests to demonstrate this. I have a slight suspicion that this may be $gmane/87202 coming back and biting us (I seem to have said “let’s run with this and see what happens” back then). * More line-ending tests. * An earlier rewrite to use strbuf_getwholeline() instead of fgets(3) to read packed-refs file revealed that the former is unacceptably inefficient. It has been optimized by using getdelim(3) when available. * The refs API uses ref_lock struct which had its own “int fd”, even though the same file descriptor was in the lock struct it contains. Clean-up the code to lose this redundant field. * There was a dead code that used to handle “git pull –tags” and show special-cased error message, which was made irrelevant when the semantics of the option changed back in Git 1.9 days. (merge 19d122b pt/pull-tags-error-diag later to maint). * Help us to find broken test script that splits the body part of the test by mistaken use of wrong kind of quotes. (merge d93d5d5 jc/test-prereq-validate later to maint). * Developer support to automatically detect broken &&-chain in the test scripts is now turned on by default. (merge 92b269f jk/test-chain-lint later to maint). * Error reporting mechanism used in “refs” API has been made more consistent. * “git pull” has more test coverage now. * “git pull” has become more aware of the options meant for underlying “git fetch” and then learned to use parse-options parser. * Clarify in the Makefile a guideline to decide use of USE_NSEC. Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. Fixes since v2.4 —————- Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.4 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases’ notes for details). * Git 2.4 broke setting verbosity and progress levels on “git clone” with native transports. (merge 822f0c4 mh/clone-verbosity-fix later to maint). * “git add -e” did not allow the user to abort the operation by killing the editor. (merge cb64800 jk/add-e-kill-editor later to maint). * Memory usage of “git index-pack” has been trimmed by tens of per-cent. (merge f0e7f11 nd/slim-index-pack-memory-usage later to maint). * “git rev-list –objects $old –not –all” to see if everything that is reachable from $old is already connected to the existing refs was very inefficient. (merge b6e8a3b jk/still-interesting later to maint). * “hash-object –literally” introduced in v2.2 was not prepared to take a really long object type name. (merge 1427a7f jc/hash-object later to maint). * “git rebase –quiet” was not quite quiet when there is nothing to do. (merge 22946a9 jk/rebase-quiet-noop later to maint). * The completion for “log –decorate=” parameter value was incorrect. (merge af16bda sg/complete-decorate-full-not-long later to maint). * “filter-branch” corrupted commit log message that ends with an incomplete line on platforms with some “sed” implementations that munge such a line. Work it around by avoiding to use “sed”. (merge df06201 jk/filter-branch-use-of-sed-on-incomplete-line later to maint). * “git daemon” fails to build from the source under NO_IPV6 configuration (regression in 2.4). (merge d358f77 jc/daemon-no-ipv6-for-2.4.1 later to maint). * Some time ago, “git blame” (incorrectly) lost the convert_to_git() call when synthesizing a fake “tip” commit that represents the state in the working tree, which broke folks who record the history with LF line ending to make their project portable across platforms while terminating lines in their working tree files with CRLF for their platform. (merge 4bf256d tb/blame-resurrect-convert-to-git later to maint). * We avoid setting core.worktree when the repository location is the “.git” directory directly at the top level of the working tree, but the code misdetected the case in which the working tree is at the root level of the filesystem (which arguably is a silly thing to do, but still valid). (merge 84ccad8 jk/init-core-worktree-at-root later to maint). * “git commit –date=now” or anything that relies on approxidate lost the daylight-saving-time offset. (merge f6e6362 jc/epochtime-wo-tz later to maint). * Access to objects in repositories that borrow from another one on a slow NFS server unnecessarily got more expensive due to recent code becoming more cautious in a naive way not to lose objects to pruning. (merge ee1c6c3 jk/prune-mtime later to maint). * The codepaths that read .gitignore and .gitattributes files have been taught that these files encoded in UTF-8 may have UTF-8 BOM marker at the beginning; this makes it in line with what we do for configuration files already. (merge 27547e5 cn/bom-in-gitignore later to maint). * a few helper scripts in the test suite did not report errors correctly. (merge de248e9 ep/fix-test-lib-functions-report later to maint). * The default $HOME/.gitconfig file created upon “git config –global” that edits it had incorrectly spelled user.name and user.email entries in it. (merge 7e11052 oh/fix-config-default-user-name-section later to maint). * “git cat-file bl $blob” failed to barf even though there is no object type that is “bl”. (merge b7994af jk/type-from-string-gently later to maint). * The usual “git diff” when seeing a file turning into a directory showed a patchset to remove the file and create all files in the directory, but “git diff –no-index” simply refused to work. Also, when asked to compare a file and a directory, imitate POSIX “diff” and compare the file with the file with the same name in the directory, instead of refusing to run. (merge 0615173 jc/diff-no-index-d-f later to maint). * “git rebase -i” moved the “current” command from “todo” to “done” a bit too prematurely, losing a step when a “pick” did not even start. (merge 8cbc57c ph/rebase-i-redo later to maint). * The connection initiation code for “ssh” transport tried to absorb differences between the stock “ssh” and Putty-supplied “plink” and its derivatives, but the logic to tell that we are using “plink” variants were too loose and falsely triggered when “plink” appeared anywhere in the path (e.g. “/home/me/bin/uplink/ssh”). (merge baaf233 bc/connect-plink later to maint). * We have prepended $GIT_EXEC_PATH and the path “git” is installed in (typically “/usr/bin”) to $PATH when invoking subprograms and hooks for almost eternity, but the original use case the latter tried to support was semi-bogus (i.e. install git to /opt/foo/git and run it without having /opt/foo on $PATH), and more importantly it has become less and less relevant as Git grew more mainstream (i.e. the users would _want_ to have it on their $PATH). Stop prepending the path in which “git” is installed to users’ $PATH, as that would interfere the command search order people depend on (e.g. they may not like versions of programs that are unrelated to Git in /usr/bin and want to override them by having different ones in /usr/local/bin and have the latter directory earlier in their $PATH). (merge a0b4507 jk/git-no-more-argv0-path-munging later to maint). * core.excludesfile (defaulting to $XDG_HOME/git/ignore) is supposed to be overridden by repository-specific .git/info/exclude file, but the order was swapped from the beginning. This belatedly fixes it. (merge 099d2d8 jc/gitignore-precedence later to maint). * There was a commented-out (instead of being marked to expect failure) test that documented a breakage that was fixed since the test was written; turn it into a proper test. (merge 66d2e04 sb/t1020-cleanup later to maint). * The “log –decorate” enhancement in Git 2.4 that shows the commit at the tip of the current branch e.g. “HEAD -> master”, did not work with –decorate=full. (merge 429ad20 mg/log-decorate-HEAD later to maint). * The ref API did not handle cases where ‘refs/heads/xyzzy/frotz’ is removed at the same time as ‘refs/heads/xyzzy’ is added (or vice versa) very well. (merge c628edf mh/ref-directory-file later to maint). * Multi-ref transaction support we merged a few releases ago unnecessarily kept many file descriptors open, risking to fail with resource exhaustion. This is for 2.4.x track. (merge 185ce3a mh/write-refs-sooner-2.4 later to maint). * “git bundle verify” did not diagnose extra parameters on the command line. (merge 7886cfa ps/bundle-verify-arg later to maint). * Various documentation mark-up fixes to make the output more consistent in general and also make AsciiDoctor (an alternative formatter) happier. (merge d0258b9 jk/asciidoc-markup-fix later to maint). (merge ad3967a jk/stripspace-asciidoctor-fix later to maint). (merge 975e382 ja/tutorial-asciidoctor-fix later to maint). * The code to read pack-bitmap wanted to allocate a few hundred pointers to a structure, but by mistake allocated and leaked memory enough to hold that many actual structures. Correct the allocation size and also have it on stack, as it is small enough. (merge 599dc76 rs/plug-leak-in-pack-bitmaps later to maint). * The pull.ff configuration was supposed to override the merge.ff configuration, but it didn’t. (merge db9bb28 pt/pull-ff-vs-merge-ff later to maint). * “git pull –log” and “git pull –no-log” worked as expected, but “git pull –log=20” did not. (merge 5061a44 pt/pull-log-n later to maint). * “git rerere forget” in a repository without rerere enabled gave a cryptic error message; it should be a silent no-op instead. (merge 0544574 jk/rerere-forget-check-enabled later to maint). * “git rebase -i” fired post-rewrite hook when it shouldn’t (namely, when it was told to stop sequencing with ‘exec’ insn). (merge 141ff8f mm/rebase-i-post-rewrite-exec later to maint). * Clarify that “log –raw” and “log –format=raw” are unrelated concepts. (merge 92de921 mm/log-format-raw-doc later to maint). * Make “git stash something –help” error out, so that users can safely say “git stash drop –help”. (merge 5ba2831 jk/stash-options later to maint). * The clean/smudge interface did not work well when filtering an empty contents (failed and then passed the empty input through). It can be argued that a filter that produces anything but empty for an empty input is nonsense, but if the user wants to do strange things, then why not? (merge f6a1e1e jh/filter-empty-contents later to maint). * Communication between the HTTP server and http_backend process can lead to a dead-lock when relaying a large ref negotiation request. Diagnose the situation better, and mitigate it by reading such a request first into core (to a reasonable limit). (merge 636614f jk/http-backend-deadlock later to maint). * “git clean pathspec…” tried to lstat(2) and complain even for paths outside the given pathspec. (merge 838d6a9 dt/clean-pathspec-filter-then-lstat later to maint). * Recent “git prune” traverses young unreachable objects to safekeep old objects in the reachability chain from them, which sometimes caused error messages that are unnecessarily alarming. (merge ce4e7b2 jk/squelch-missing-link-warning-for-unreachable later to maint). * The configuration reader/writer uses mmap(2) interface to access the files; when we find a directory, it barfed with “Out of memory?”. (merge 9ca0aaf jk/diagnose-config-mmap-failure later to maint). * “color.diff.plain” was a misnomer; give it ‘color.diff.context’ as a more logical synonym. (merge 8dbf3eb jk/color-diff-plain-is-context later to maint). * The setup code used to die when core.bare and core.worktree are set inconsistently, even for commands that do not need working tree. (merge fada767 jk/die-on-bogus-worktree-late later to maint). * Recent Mac OS X updates breaks the logic to detect that the machine is on the AC power in the sample pre-auto-gc script. (merge c54c7b3 pa/auto-gc-mac-osx later to maint). * “git commit –cleanup=scissors” was not careful enough to protect against getting fooled by a line that looked like scissors. (merge fbfa097 sg/commit-cleanup-scissors later to maint). * “Have we lost a race with competing repack?” check was too expensive, especially while receiving a huge object transfer that runs index-pack (e.g. “clone” or “fetch”). (merge 0eeb077 jk/index-pack-reduce-recheck later to maint). * The tcsh completion writes a bash scriptlet but that would have failed for users with noclobber set. (merge 0b1f688 af/tcsh-completion-noclobber later to maint). * “git for-each-ref” reported “missing object” for 0{40} when it encounters a broken ref. The lack of object whose name is 0{40} is not the problem; the ref being broken is. (merge 501cf47 mh/reporting-broken-refs-from-for-each-ref later to maint). * Various fixes around “git am” that applies a patch to a history that is not there yet. (merge 6ea3b67 pt/am-abort-fix later to maint). * “git fsck” used to ignore missing or invalid objects recorded in reflog. (merge 19bf6c9 mh/fsck-reflog-entries later to maint). * “git format-patch –ignore-if-upstream A..B” did not like to be fed tags as boundary commits. (merge 9b7a61d jc/do-not-feed-tags-to-clear-commit-marks later to maint). * “git fetch –depth=” and “git clone –depth=” issued a shallow transfer request even to an upload-pack that does not support the capability. (merge eb86a50 me/fetch-into-shallow-safety later to maint). * “git rebase” did not exit with failure when format-patch it invoked failed for whatever reason. (merge 60d708b cb/rebase-am-exit-code later to maint). * Fix a small bug in our use of umask() return value. (merge 3096b2e jk/fix-refresh-utime later to maint). * An ancient test framework enhancement to allow color was not entirely correct; this makes it work even when tput needs to read from the ~/.terminfo under the user’s real HOME directory. (merge d5c1b7c rh/test-color-avoid-terminfo-in-original-home later to maint). * A minor bugfix when pack bitmap is used with “rev-list –count”. (merge c8a70d3 jk/rev-list-no-bitmap-while-pruning later to maint). * “git config” failed to update the configuration file when the underlying filesystem is incapable of renaming a file that is still open. (merge 7a64592 kb/config-unmap-before-renaming later to maint). * Avoid possible ssize_t to int truncation. (merge 6c8afe4 mh/strbuf-read-file-returns-ssize-t later to maint). * When you say “!” while running say “git log”, you’d confuse yourself in the resulting shell, that may look as if you took control back to the original shell you spawned “git log” from but that isn’t what is happening. To that new shell, we leaked GIT_PAGER_IN_USE environment variable that was meant as a local communication between the original “Git” and subprocesses that was spawned by it after we launched the pager, which caused many “interesting” things to happen, e.g. “git diff | cat” still paints its output in color by default. Stop leaking that environment variable to the pager’s half of the fork; we only need it on “Git” side when we spawn the pager. (merge 124b519 jc/unexport-git-pager-in-use-in-pager later to maint). * Abandoning an already applied change in “git rebase -i” with “–continue” left CHERRY_PICK_HEAD and confused later steps. (merge 0e0aff4 js/rebase-i-clean-up-upon-continue-to-skip later to maint). * We used to ask libCURL to use the most secure authentication method available when talking to an HTTP proxy only when we were told to talk to one via configuration variables. We now ask libCURL to always use the most secure authentication method, because the user can tell libCURL to use an HTTP proxy via an environment variable without using configuration variables. (merge 5841520 et/http-proxyauth later to maint). * A fix to a minor regression to “git fsck” in v2.2 era that started complaining about a body-less tag object when it lacks a separator empty line after its header to separate it with a non-existent body. (merge 84d18c0 jc/fsck-retire-require-eoh later to maint). * Code cleanups and documentation updates. (merge 0269f96 mm/usage-log-l-can-take-regex later to maint). (merge 64f2589 nd/t1509-chroot-test later to maint). (merge d201a1e sb/test-bitmap-free-at-end later to maint). (merge 05bfc7d sb/line-log-plug-pairdiff-leak later to maint). (merge 846e5df pt/xdg-config-path later to maint). (merge 1154aa4 jc/plug-fmt-merge-msg-leak later to maint). (merge 319b678 jk/sha1-file-reduce-useless-warnings later to maint). (merge 9a35c14 fg/document-commit-message-stripping later to maint). (merge bbf431c ps/doc-packfile-vs-pack-file later to maint). (merge 309a9e3 jk/skip-http-tests-under-no-curl later to maint). (merge ccd593c dl/branch-error-message later to maint). (merge 22570b6 rs/janitorial later to maint). (merge 5c2a581 mc/commit-doc-grammofix later to maint). (merge ce41720 ah/usage-strings later to maint). (merge e6a268c sb/glossary-submodule later to maint). (merge ec48a76 sb/submodule-doc-intro later to maint). (merge 14f8b9b jk/clone-dissociate later to maint). (merge 055c7e9 sb/pack-protocol-mention-smart-http later to maint). (merge 7c37a5d jk/make-fix-dependencies later to maint). (merge fc0aa39 sg/merge-summary-config later to maint). (merge 329af6c pt/t0302-needs-sanity later to maint). (merge d614f07 fk/doc-format-patch-vn later to maint). (merge 72dbb36 sg/completion-commit-cleanup later to maint). (merge e654eb2 es/utf8-stupid-compiler-workaround later to maint). (merge 34b935c es/osx-header-pollutes-mask-macro later to maint). (merge ab7fade jc/prompt-document-ps1-state-separator later to maint). (merge 25f600e mm/describe-doc later to maint). (merge 83fe167 mm/branch-doc-updates later to maint). (merge 75d2e5a ls/hint-rev-list-count later to maint). (merge edc8f71 cb/subtree-tests-update later to maint). (merge 5330e6e sb/p5310-and-chain later to maint). (merge c4ac525 tb/checkout-doc later to maint). (merge e479c5f jk/pretty-encoding-doc later to maint). (merge 7e837c6 ss/clone-guess-dir-name-simplify later to maint).

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Original URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/feedsapi/BwPx/~3/06h7t3JDGMY/2.5.0.txt

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It’s been two years since filmmakers making a documentary about the song “Happy Birthday” filed a lawsuit claiming that the song shouldn’t be under copyright. Now, they have filed (PDF) what they say is “proverbial smoking-gun evidence” that should cause the judge to rule in their favor.

The “smoking gun” is a 1927 version of the “Happy Birthday” lyrics, predating Warner/Chappell’s 1935 copyright by eight years. That 1927 songbook, along with other versions located through the plaintiffs’ investigations, “conclusively prove that any copyright that may have existed for the song itself… expired decades ago.”

If the filmmakers’ lawyers are right, it could mean a quick route to victory in a lawsuit that’s been both slow-moving and closely watched by copyright reform advocates. Warner/Chappell has built a licensing empire based on “Happy Birthday,” which in 1996 was pulling in more than $2 million per year.

Plaintiff Jennifer Nelson’s movie is actually called Happy Birthday, and it’s about the song. She had to pay Warner/Chappell $1,500 to use the song in her movie, and that didn’t sit well with the documentarian. She’s seeking to get that money back and also represent a class of plaintiffs who have paid similar licensing fees to Warner/Chappell on a copyright she and her lawyers say is illegitimate.

The 1927 songbook referenced above was found in a batch of 500 documents provided by Warner/Chappell earlier this month. That cache included “approximately 200 pages of documents [Warner/Chappell] claim were ‘mistakenly’ not produced during discovery, which ended on July 11, 2014, more than one year earlier,” Nelson’s lawyers write.

The new filing comes as US District Judge George King was just two days away from holding a hearing about whether or not songwriter Patty Hill abandoned her rights to the lyrics. The plaintiffs say that the newly discovered songbook evidence is so strong that the copyright abandonment issue is moot.

“[T]he documents prove conclusively that the song is in the public domain, thus making it unnecessary for the Court to decide the scope or validity of the disputed copyrights, much less whether Patty Hill abandoned any copyright she may have had to the lyrics,” they write.

Reading the motion is an exercise in understanding the mind-boggling complexity of music copyright.

In 1927, Chicago music publisher The Cable Company produced the 15th edition of the children’s song book called The Everyday Song Book (Graded). It included the “Good Morning” and “Birthday Song,” which featured the melody for “Good Morning To You,” a song dating back to the 19th century, combined with Patty Hill’s lyrics for both “Good Morning” and “Happy Birthday.”

Further investigation showed that the song appeared in editions stretching back to 1922, which in the plaintiffs’ view “proves conclusively” that “Happy Birthday” entered the public domain no later than that year. The song was printed without a copyright notice unlike other songs in the book. Rather, it included a notice that read “Special permission through courtesy of The Clayton F. Summy Co.”

The Summy company is a publisher whom Warner/Chappell has maintained never authorized any pre-1935 publishing of the “Happy Birthday” lyrics.

That important line of text published underneath the song’s lyrics was “blurred almost beyond legibility” in the copy that Warner/Chappell handed over in discovery. Plaintiffs’ lawyers note that it’s “the only line of the entire PDF that is blurred in that manner.”

Plaintiffs acquired their own copies of the songbook, including a first edition published in 1916, which didn’t have the song, and versions published 1922 and later, which include it without a copyright notice.

That’s critical, because under the 1909 Copyright Act which was then in force, a published work had to include the word “Copyright,” the abbreviation “Copr., ” or the “©” symbol, or “the published work was interjected irrevocably into the public domain.”

The plaintiffs argue that the 1922 publication without proper notice forfeited copyright in the work. Even if the judge overseeing the case doesn’t agree with them, however, there’s a secondary argument: the copyright for the whole 1922 songbook expired in 1949.

There’s even a third line of defense: even if the work had been published in 1922 with proper notice, and even if that copyright had been renewed in 1949 (which the plaintiffs say it wasn’t), the song still would have become public domain at midnight on December 31, 1997.

Warner/Chappell hasn’t yet responded to the motion. Since a hearing was scheduled for Wednesday, it’s likely there will be some further developments in the case later this week.

Warner/Chappell “should admit defeat but they won’t because too much money is at stake,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Randall Newman told The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the new motion.

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Original URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/feedsapi/BwPx/~3/SVWFRRYR6LM/

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Original URL: http://scripting.com/2015/07/27/demoOfTheNewMywordEditor.html

Original article