Happy Birthday Song WTF?

marcus6176 · 02-09-10, 12:41 AM

I was watching an episode of operation repo, when they were going to sing Happybirthday to a tow truck that has been working for them for a while. when they started singing the song, a black bar apeared and said they can not air the audio for the "Happy Birthday song" due to the prohibitive cost of licensing the happy birthday song.

that is messed up, in so many ways.

Wizard · 02-09-10, 07:15 AM

I think it is around $5,000 to use that song. Whether I had the money or not I would have done the same thing just to show the absurdity of it all.

Fixxxer · 02-09-10, 04:56 PM

There's a big to do about whether the birthday song is still under copyright or not. The $5000 price tag is what Disney paid to allow it to be sung by one of their rides several years back. It's much more these days, which is why it rarely appears in movies. There's some decent information on the wiki site for anyone that's interested.