'Happy Birthday' Song Is About to Become Public Domain
One of the world’s most recognizable songs will be set free.
Dec 9 (Reuters) – A settlement has been reached in a U.S. lawsuit with Warner/Chappell Music over the copyright to “Happy Birthday to You” that will put one of the world’s most recognizable songs in the public domain, according to court papers released on Wednesday and a source close to the case.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed in court papers announcing the settlement, but it puts an end to the class-action lawsuit filed in 2013 by a group of artists and filmmakers who had sought a return of the millions of dollars in fees the company had collected over the years for use of the song.
Once the settlement is finalized, the song will be in the public domain, the source said. That means it will be free for all to use without fear of a lawsuit.
In September, Chief U.S. District Judge George King in Los Angeles ruled that Warner/Chappell, the music publishing arm of privately owned Warner Music Group, did not own a copyright to the Happy Birthday lyrics.
“While we respectfully disagreed with the court’s decision, we are pleased to have now resolved this matter,” Warner/Chappell said in a statement. An attorney for the artists could not immediately be reached.
The case garnered attention from around the world not only because the tune is so commonly performed, but because many people were not aware it was still under copyright, let alone purportedly owned by a major corporation.
The song has a complicated history reaching back to the 1893 publication of “Good Morning to All,” a children’s song written by a Kentucky woman named Mildred Hill and her sister, Patty.
That melody eventually came to be sung with the familiar Happy Birthday lyrics.
Warner contended its copyright to the lyrics came through the Hill sisters’ publisher that it had acquired. But King said that publisher never got the rights to the lyrics and so neither did Warner.
People who sing Happy Birthday in their homes or at private gatherings have typically never been at risk of a lawsuit. But when the song has been used for commercial purposes, such as in films, Warner has enforced its rights, and took in an estimated $2 million in royalties for such uses each year.
The case is Good Morning To You Productions Corp et al v. Warner/Chappell Music Inc, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, No. 13-cv-4460.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Alexia Garamfalvi)
FBI Official Acknowledges Using Top Secret Hacking Weapons
A top agency official acknowledged that it uses secret software vulnerabilities in investigations.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently made an unprecedented admission: It uses undisclosed software vulnerabilities when hacking suspects’ computers.
Amy Hess, head of the FBI’s science and technology arm, recently went on the record about the practice with the Washington Post. “Hess acknowledged that the bureau uses zero-days,” the Post reported on Tuesday, using industry-speak for generally unknown computer bugs. The name derives from the way such flaws blind side security pros. By the time attackers have begun taking advantage of these coding flubs, software engineers are left with zero days to fix them.
Never before has an FBI official conceded the point, the Post notes. That’s noteworthy. Although the news itself is not exactly a shocker. It is well known among cybersecurity and privacy circles that the agency has had a zero day policy in place since 2010, thanks to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and published earlier this year on Wired. And working groups had been assembled at least two years earlier to begin mapping out that policy, as a document obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation privacy organization and also published on Wired shows. Now though, Hess, an executive assistant director with the FBI, seems to have confirmed the activity.
(People surmised as much after the FBI was outed as a customer of the Italian spyware firm Hacking Team after hackers stole some of its internal documents and published them online this year, too.)
The agency’s “network investigative techniques,” as these hacking operations are known, originate inside the FBI’s Operational Technology Division in an enclave known as its Remote Operations Unit, according to the Post. They’re rarely discussed publicly, and many privacy advocates have a number of concerns about the system, which they say could potentially be abused or have unsavory consequences.
Law enforcement agencies’ reliance on such exploits poses a Catch-22. On the one hand, hoarding coveted bugs and keeping them secret lets authorities slyly target suspects and collect evidence (with a warrant, of course). On the other hand, alerting tech companies about flaws in their products lets them fix the problems, protecting customers everywhere and securing them against attacks from less well-intentioned hackers and spies. The two incentives are undeniably at odds.
That dilemma grows more complex when another compelling reason for agencies like the FBI to use zero days enters the mix. The hacking method lets investigators sidestep roadblocks posed by strong encryption, a technology that scrambles data and communications and increasingly leaves the Feds in the dark, so to speak, when probing wires and hard drives for incriminating information. Consider the hacking option as the agency’s “plan B,” as the Intercept has detailed.
The tactic isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, Jonathan Mayer, the Federal Communication Commission’s recently appointed technical lead for investigations who is also a well-known privacy advocate, earlier this year described hacking as a potentially “legitimate and effective law enforcement technique” in an academic paper. Another set of big-name security researchers also recently argued in a paper that targeted hacking campaigns could provide a tolerable alternative to mandating that tech firms add special “backdoor” access to their encrypted products for investigators.
Before the hacking option can be considered a comprehensive solution, many of the details would need to be worked out. Hess admits that the agency regularly grapples with these questions. As Post reporter Ellen Nakashima writes:
[Hess] said the trade-off is one the bureau wrestles with. “What is the greater good — to be able to identify a person who is threatening public safety?” Or to alert software makers to bugs that, if unpatched, could leave consumers vulnerable?“How do we balance that?” she said. “That is a constant challenge for us.”She added that hacking computers is not a favored FBI technique. “It’s frail,” she said. As soon as a tech firm updates its software, the tool vanishes. “It clearly is not reliable” in the way a traditional wiretap is, she said.
Perhaps that’s why the agency continues to throw its weight behind legislative proposals that seek “backdoor” access to encrypted products, despite the fact that many technologists oppose such a scenario on the grounds that it would expose people to unacceptable risk. For what it’s worth, the security scholars who wrote one of the papers referenced above recommend that law enforcement agencies adopt a prompt responsible disclosure policy. Per the paper:
“We propose that law enforcement adopt strict guidelines requiring immediate disclosure to the vendor any vulnerabilities as soon they are discovered,” they write. “As we will discuss, such guidelines would allow law enforcement to fully support crime prevention, and—because of the natural lag of the software lifecycle—still allow law enforcement to build a sufficiently rich toolkit to conduct investigations in practice.”
These legal procedures have yet to be thoroughly debated and ironed out but, in the meantime, we can at least put to rest a lingering uncertainty. To the question “is the FBI using zero days in criminal investigations?”—as the subject of a blog post on Lawfare recently inquired—one can erase the question mark. The answer is apparently yes.
Follow Robert Hackett on Twitter at @rhhackett. Read his cybersecurity, technology, and business coverage here. And subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology, where he writes a weekly column.
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Mark Zuckerberg Offers Support to Muslims in Facebook Post
“As long as we stand together and see the good in each other, we can build a better world for all people.”
By Daniel White, TIME
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg came to the defense of Muslims around the world, arguing that they should not be persecuted for the actions of extremists.
“If you’re a Muslim in this community, as the leader of Facebook I want you to know that you are always welcome here and that we will fight to protect your rights and create a peaceful and safe environment for you,” wrote Zuckerberg in a Facebook post.
Zuckerberg’s comments come after a rash of anti-Muslim sentiment following the attacks in Paris and the massacre in San Bernardino, particularly those made by leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump has proposed a ban on Muslims entering the United States
“As a Jew, my parents taught me that we must stand up against attacks on all communities,” wrote Zuckerberg. “Even if an attack isn’t against you today, in time attacks on freedom for anyone will hurt everyone.”
For more about Facebook, watch this Fortune video:
Google's Plan for Faster Mobile Web May Reshuffle Search Rankings
Faster web pages could mean higher search results for some publishers.
Media outlets that participate in Google’s ambitious project to make websites load more quickly on mobile devices could find themselves higher in Google’s search results in 2016. But companies that don’t sign on could be buried lower down.
Google unveiled more details on Wednesday about its ambitious project called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to make news articles more reader friendly on the mobile web. The company said in a blog post that news articles using the AMP technology would begin appearing in search results as early as late February.
The underlying idea behind the AMP project is that much of the content produced by media outlets takes too long to load on readers’ phones.
Part of the reason for this slowness is the software code running in the background. This software can be old, bloated, and contain bits of code from features that publishers added over the years that can conflict with one another.
At the heart of Google’s GOOG -1.41% AMP project is a custom-made version of the ubiquitous HTML code that’s cleaner and less bulky than software publishers typically use, Google executives explained during a press event. The web pages created with the custom code can also be cached, which means that online publishers can store temporary clones of the content on servers near readers so that it takes less time to load.
Companies that switch to using the new code will essentially have another version of their news articles that have been “AMPed,” so to speak. Google will not store the original news articles on its infrastructure, and the files will be the sole possession of media outlets, explained Malte Ubl, a Google technical lead on the AMP Project.
However, Google will let publishers store cached versions of their news articles in Google’s servers, which Ubl said will benefit small publishers because they don’t necessarily have the money or expertise to do the job themselves. They can instead take advantage of Google’s infrastructure to help distribute their content faster.
When asked whether Google would prioritize AMPed news articles in its search rankings in the coming year, Google product manager Rudy Galfi said that the company will use webpage load times as one of many criteria to determine rankings. However, publishers that post inaccurate news articles will still get dinged in search rankings versus more reputable outlets— regardless of speed, he explained.
“The way we think about it is, speed is one of those critical ranking factors, not the only one that you need, and AMP says to us, basically, ‘I’m consistently fast,’” said Galfi.
Google executives stressed that the AMP project is still in its early stages, and because the project is open source, interested parties can download the code from the software repository service GitHub and share their feedback.
Twitter will also experiment with linking to AMP articles next year for users of the social messaging service, explained Michael Ducker, head of publisher products for Twitter TWTR -2.72% . Twitter has found that AMP articles are much quicker than typical news articles and it would rather redirect readers to the AMP version of news articles if they exist.
“Sometime in the early next year we will begin experimenting with the links automatically being changed into AMP URLs,” said Ducker.
Since the project was first announced in October, a wide variety of media outlets like The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Guardian and Vox Media have pledged support for the project. Several online advertising companies like Outbrain and AOL also “have expressed their intention to support AMP,” according to the Google blog post.
Time Inc., which owns Fortune, did not respond to a request for comment about whether it plans to participate.
Although many media outlets have pledged support, some have questioned whether Google should decide the best way for publishers to distribute and display their content. For example, in an October interview with industry trade publication Digiday, media consultant Aram Zucker-Scharff compared the project to Facebook’s Instant Articlesproject, which is pitched as making news articles easier to read by hosting them directly on the social network’s site.
“Instant Articles are problematic because publishers are giving control over to Facebook to determine how content is displayed to Facebook users,” Zucker-Scharff said. “But AMP is troubling because Google is telling us how it thinks the entire Web should work.”
The blog post also said that engineers working on AMP are testing how the project will work with publishers that use metered paywalls and subscriptions. The project is also working to make ads load faster.
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