It's the song that became the anthem of the civil rights movement. Come we Sha, Come We Show. The words became a rallying cry for the movement. As Martin Luther King explained in a speech four days before his death, deep in my heart, I do believe we shall overcome. No John hands often with students and others behind tail bass singing it, we shall overcome this. Sometimes we've had tears and eyes when we dawned together to sing it,
but we still decided to sing it. You probably assumed that song belongs to the public, but it didn't until last week. A New York federal judge struck down the copyright for the first verse of the song. Joining Me is the attorney who won that judgment. It's leading the class action against the music publishers who claimed to hold the copyright. If we shall overcome? Mark Rifkin, a partner at Wolf halden Stein, Mark, why did your clients decide
to challenge the copyright June? For them, this was such an important song, such an iconic song, and so important in the freedom struggle and in the story to tell about the freedom struggle that they believed the song had to be put back in the public domain where it began in the nineties before before Ludlow filed a copyright for the song and tell me who your clients were, So we represent We represent two clients in the case.
The first is UH though we shall Overcome Foundation, a nonprofit organization that was producing a movie and still will release the movie about the song, the history of the song, and to use the song in the movie, they had to pay a royalty to Ludlow Music to be able to do that. And our other client in the case
is Butler Films. They produced the famous movie Lee Daniels The Butler and and they too had to pay a fee to use the song and in fact only use the song for a couple of seconds in the movie because of the amount of money that was demanded by
Ludlow to use the song. The song has been traced back to spirituals how to get copyright protection in the first place, The song has its origin as at least here in this country as a Negro spiritual and UH we were able to date the song at least back to the turn of the twentieth century, so early nine hundreds. It was published by a magazine that was owned in part by Pete Seeger as we Will Overcome, with virtually the same lyrics and virtually the same melody, but without
a copyright. In nineteen sixty, the music publisher Music decided that it would copyright what was otherwise a public domain work on the basis of a couple of tiny and insignificant changes that they identified in the song. And we challenged the ability UH to copyright the the trivial and insignificant changes. So what was the defendant's argument about those changes. Well,
there there are two lyric changes. In the famous verse we will overcome became we shall overcome, and the lyric U down in my heart became deep in my heart. So the word will was changed to shall somewhere along the line, and the word uh deep was changed to down somewhere along the line. And they say they were the most important changes to the song. We say they were the kinds of changes that don't entitle anybody to
a copyright. And we also said, in this case, there was no conclusive proof who made those changes in the first place. So the judge agreed with you. And but just about the first verse, Well, the first verse and the fifth verse are identical. There's eight verses to the song, and and on the first verse and fifth verse, the
same verse that everybody recognizes. Judge Code ruled that the changes to the lyrics that I just mentioned, and a couple of tiny little changes literally an eighth note or a quarter note in the melody were not sufficiently original
to warrant copyright protection. And that means that Judge Code agreed with us and with our musicologist that the changes were the kinds of changes that any musician might make in performing a song, and that doesn't create a new work, and so she struck down the copyright for the for the melody and for the famous lyrics on that basis. So what happens with the rest of the song now, Well, we have a couple of arguments to make. There's a there's a trial that will begin sometime in December of
this year, and we intend to prove two things. First, we intend to prove that the four authors that were identified in the copyrights didn't write those lyrics. But but as importantly, we intend to prove that Ludlow committed a fraud on the copyright office and disguise the origin of the song to claim copyright when they really had no right to it, and the judge made said that she had nothing to say about those two issues in her ruling.
Um tell me about Pete Seeger's connection with it, because it gave it a certain um authenticity when you hear that he was one of the people with the copyright. What what we have discovered is that Seeger introduced the song to Ludlow, to the publisher in the late nineteen fifties,
fifty or nineteen fifty nine. He was not on the original copyright that was filed in nineteen sixty although the only work that Ludlow ever specifically attributed to any particular author was the two lyrical changes that they attributed to Seeger. We have a theory about why Seeger wasn't on the copyright, and we will prove that at the trial in December. But he was not on the copyright even though he introduced the song to Ludlow, and and he was the
one that Ludlow says made those changes. Now you introduce you sued and one over another iconic song, the Happy Birthday Song, that another song that everyone thought was copyright protected. Were there similarities in the two cases or in the
way you investigated it? Or what you found out. Similarities in both cases and certainly in the way we went about investigating them in in either case, the songs really were public popular songs to begin with, and a publisher claimed a copyright and work that had been in the public domain long before the copyright applications were filed, and
similar in the way they were investigated. My partner Randy Newman is an absolute genius at at ferreting out the real facts and and spent months and months in both cases delving into the historical record before we filed either case.
It's it's amazing the similarities between these two songs in that so many people, I mean, I think that most people would think that these songs were in the public domain, and especially I'm a Happy Birthday and you've heard this as a civil rights anthem for so long and in so many places. Yeah, I think the common thread here is that they are both public works, they are original to uh the public really um and and what we have is a misuse of copyright. We're going to hear
more about this or taking it to trial. That's Mark Rifkin, he's a partner at Wolf holden Stein. That's it for this edition. Of Bloomberg Law thanks to our producer David Suckerman and our technical director Reginald Bazil. Coming up next Bloomberg Markets with Carol Masser and Corey Johnson. I'm June Grossa. You've been listening to Bloomberg Law. This is Bloomberg