Happy Birthday has been trademarked

There is a strong movement against copyrighting of material with the argument that it stiffles innovation. This is the reason why Creative Common becomes so successful, since they take a more flexible look at it.

There is now this Chinese company called Fufeng that trademarked the wods "Happy Birthday", what means that no other company can use the words together with their products without paying royalties.

Their argument is that with "increasingly fierce competition in the world toy market, the company realized the importance of branding. They were inspired to register the "well-known and pleasant phrase 'happy birthday""

I think that this is a major blow to other companies that used the words in a generic and happy sense. Imagine, no more toys with happy birthday, no cakes or anything.

And this has nothing to do with branding, but only with plain selfish egoism. Someone should tell the little kids that, well, no more cake with Happy Birthday because someone is branding the words somewhere else. Phhhh.