<P> On August 5, 2013, the first anniversary of its landing on Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover celebrated its "birthday" when engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center used the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument to cause the rover to "sing" Happy Birthday on the Martian surface . </P> <P> During the March 6, 2014 episode of the Comedy Central series The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert planned to sing the song in honor of the 90th anniversary of its 1924 publication . Due to the copyright issues, Colbert instead performed his new "royalty - free" birthday song, which is set to "The Star - Spangled Banner". </P>

When does the copyright on happy birthday expire